


It's a Love Song

by SomeoneAsGoodAsYou (the_wanlorn)



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Brief Torture, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 03, ambiguous ending, orpheus & eurydice fusion, sorry guys :(, temporary major character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2020-10-21 14:27:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20695058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_wanlorn/pseuds/SomeoneAsGoodAsYou
Summary: With all their troubles seemingly behind them, Chloe and Lucifer are finally dating and happy. When Lucifer disappears after an emotional conversation, will Chloe be able to bring him home?Lucifer has returned to Hell and Chloe is pretty sure it wasn't willingly. When she discovers that the only way to get him to return is to fetch him herself, she begins a long and arduous journey to the center of Hell to find him. How much will she be willing to give up to save the man she loves?It's a love song/About someone who tries.





	1. We Were Happy Once

**Author's Note:**

> I've been thinking a lot about the types of stories we tell and how we tell them. How we end them. I wrote this in early 2018, while season 3 was still going, so it's a canon divergence AU at this point. Season 3 happened and Chloe has come to terms with everything. Season 4? What season 4?
> 
> This is the role-swapped Orpheus & Eurydice fusion fic no one asked for. I've been working on a vague outline for this story for about eight years and many, many fandoms. It's finally found a home and I could not be happier that it's Lucifer fandom, with all of you. And the good news is, it's finished! I'll be updating every Wednesday.
> 
> Thanks go to the OCR of _Hadestown: The Myth. The Musical_ for the fic title, chapter titles, and quotes in the summary and notes. If you're into folk operas, Hades and Persephone, and/or Orpheus and Eurydice, definitely give it or the concept album a listen.
> 
> Bigger thanks go to tarysande, without whom the entire first chapter wouldn't exist. Most of this fic is unbeta'd, though. We die like men.
> 
> _It's an old song, and we're gonna sing it again._

"Detective!"

Chloe smiled at the sight of Lucifer leaning against her car, waving to her as though she could possibly miss him, as though they hadn't been together at her desk a couple hours ago. He was grinning, a sight she'd worried she would never see again after the explosive results of finding out he really was the Devil.

She couldn't wipe the ridiculous look of happiness off her face, and she knew that he could see it. But she hadn't expected to see him after he'd left earlier, claiming he had important business to take care of. Or, well, he didn't lie to her, ever—and wasn't that a trip, that he may have obfuscated and danced around things but never outright lied—so she shouldn't doubt that he was really doing what he said he was doing.

It was a hard habit to break.

"Lucifer," she said, coming to a stop in front of him. His eyes were shining with happiness, and she couldn't bring herself to protest when he leaned down to kiss her softly, even though technically they were still in view of the station.

"Hello," he said, tucking a strand of hair that had escaped her ponytail behind her ear. He was looking at her again like a man who had won the lottery and didn't remember buying a ticket. It was a heady feeling, to be watched like she was something precious to him. It had been... a long time since someone had looked at her like that.

"Hi," she breathed out, and then the sound of footsteps had her shaking herself out of it and leaning back a little. "Why are you here? I thought you were busy."

He put a hand against his chest, playing wounded. "Busy? Hardly, darling. There was just a small matter that came up at Lux, nothing for you to worry about."

"I wasn't worried," she said with a smile. At least, not much. And certainly not really rationally. They had only recently defined their relationship, and she still felt sometimes like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Of course not," he agreed readily. "I was thinking, perhaps we could go to Junior's for dinner tonight? You know he rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up."

"It's Taco Tuesday," she pointed out. She really hoped that the business he had to take care of wasn't getting them reservations at the restaurant, because she couldn't break the sanctity of Taco Tuesday.

"I know," he said, "But I'm sure the chef wouldn't mind making tacos." His smile shifted to something both teasing and smug. "He does owe me a favor after all."

She couldn't help but roll her eyes at him. "That's not the point of Taco Tuesday."

"It's... not?" He sounded confused, and almost worried, so she turned to lean against the SUV next to him, letting her fingers catch on his. It made her feel giddy, the knowledge that she was free to touch in all the ways she'd wanted before but never had the right to, and she couldn't stop a smile from growing on her face.

That didn't seem to reassure Lucifer, who had turned his head toward her as he said, "But, there would be tacos. And it is Tuesday. And of course Beatrice is welcome to come, and I suppose Daniel too."

"Didn't your family ever-" she started, but bit the words off as soon as she realized what she was saying. His grip tightened on hers for a second before relaxing so much she had to tighten hers so he didn't slip away from her.

"They weren't much for... well. Anything you can imagine, really," he said, face grim.

"I know," she said, stopping herself from reaching up to cup his cheek in her hand, before remembering that she was allowed, any time she wanted, and doing it. "I wasn't thinking. I'm sorry."

He glanced away, but leaned into her touch. "It's quite alright," he said, and while she believed that he thought that was true, she couldn't shake the uneasy feeling that sometimes skated down her back when she accidentally stepped into the middle of his... issues.

"Okay," she said softy. "Anyway, it's not about having tacos for dinner. It's about getting together as a family. It's for- for bonding and just being together even though our lives are hectic."

Understanding filled his gaze, and he nodded once, sharply. "Right then. I'll just let you get to it."

Okay, so not understanding. He pushed himself off the car with his free hand and clearly meant to walk away, but she couldn't let him go like that. Yes, what they had together was new, but _they_ weren't new. There was no reason for him to be looking like a kicked puppy.

"Trixie would love it if you came tonight," she said before she could change her mind and added, quieter, looking away but not dropping his hand, "I would love it if you came tonight."

It was true, she would, but she was also wary of putting too much pressure on him, of making him feel caged in and trapped in a relationship with her. It was the last thing she wanted to do, because she knew what happened when he felt backed into a corner by something. Vegas happened. Candy happened. It wasn't an experience she was eager to repeat, but she couldn't not offer, not when he looked like he was waiting for her to send him away or something worse.

When she chanced a look at him, he was staring down at her, lips parted in what must have been surprise, because it took an almost full-body shake for him to roust himself from his own thoughts.

"But, Detective," he said softly. "If it's- I'm not-"

"Like hell you aren't," she said, surprised by the fierceness in her voice, and groaned when she realized what she'd said. Lucifer didn't bother trying to hide his chuckle.

"There is nothing about Hell similar to this situation," he said, maybe more firmly than he had meant to because he looked almost surprised at the words that had come out. "If you truly want..." He looked away again, seemingly unable to bring himself to say it.

"I do," she said, tugging at him gently until he stepped two steps closer and back into her space. "You're always welcome. Always."

He didn't look like he believed her, but that was okay. If she could keep from scaring him away, they'd have plenty of time for her to convince him he was just as precious to her as she hoped she was to him.

* * *

Chloe stopped at her door and turned, smiling up at Lucifer. He leaned down, brushing his lips across hers, only lingering for a moment before pulling back. An innocent kiss, one she wouldn't have guessed he'd be capable of a few months ago. But everything had changed, hadn't it?

"I suppose this is good night, then," he said, and she was drowning in his eyes. She didn't want the night to end, not when it had been so... perfect. A night of dinner and dancing and soft looks by candlelight.

"Do you want to come in?" she found herself asking, hand groping back for the door handle. Trixie would probably be in bed, and that was enough for her, enough to possibly prolong the night.

A slow smile spread across Lucifer's face, and she thought maybe he didn't want the night to end just as much as her. "Why, Detective, is that an invitation I hear? Not worried about scarring your spawn for life?"

"Yeah, I think Dan and I already did that," she said before thinking it through, and winced at the look that flashed across his face, the sudden uncertainty in his eyes that he tried to mask with a smile that didn't quite hold up.

"Ah," he said, but she was hurrying on before he could say any more.

"What I'm saying," she said, putting her hands flat against his chest, "is that I'd really like it if you came in. Trixie should be asleep by now and, well."

"Yes," he said. "'And, well,' indeed. I would be delighted, Detective."

The kiss once they were inside and Chloe had sent the babysitter away was far less chaste. It sent fire streaking through her body, and while Lucifer had been exceptionally patient with her, not pushing any further than he did before they started seeing each other, she .was ready for him to stop being a gentleman.

She pulled away from him, and the noise of loss he made when her lips left his sent a bolt of pure desire to her core.

"Detective?" he asked, "Chloe?"

"Upstairs," she said, licking her lips and grinning when his eyes followed the motion. "We can't do this here."

"Of course," he said. She began backing away from him, one hand caught in his shirt as she pulled him along. He didn't put up much of a fight, just grinning—it felt like he hadn't stopped smiling at her since she asked him to dinner the first time—and following. She nearly tripped over the stairs when she got to them, heels hitting them hard, but of course he steadied her and, when she let go of him to turn, caught her hand and followed.

In the morning, she woke to an empty bed and the sound of Trixie laughing. The smell of bacon wafted up to her bedroom and she stretched and smiled. She couldn't be upset or nervous about waking up alone, not when his jacket was still hanging off the end of her bed and the smell of food was coming from downstairs.

She found them both standing in front of the stove—and maybe something in her should have worried more at that, given how much Lucifer didn't understand about children—with a pan out and a bowl on the counter beside them.

"Here," Lucifer was saying as she paused in the doorway to watch them. He only shrank away a little when Trixie, standing on a chair next to him, grabbed the spatula out of his hand and Chloe almost felt proud of him. "Try it."

Trixie had her tongue out in concentration and was using both hands to hold the spatula, and Chloe was glad she'd thought to grab her phone before she came down because she needed to take a photo of this.

At the sound of the camera shutter, just as Trixie managed to get a pancake sort of flipped, both of them whirled around, a huge grin on Trixie's face and a slightly nervous smile on Lucifer's. He'd put a hand out to make sure Trixie didn't fall off the chair, and she snapped another picture quickly before putting her phone away.

"We're making pancakes!" Trixie said, waving the spatula and only flinging a little bit of batter onto the counter and floor. Lucifer snatched it from her before she could hit him with it, frowning at her, but Trixie didn't notice.

"I see that," she said, and smiled, moving into the kitchen to stand beside the two of them. "Smells good."

"Detective..." Lucifer said. There was a tick in his jaw as she watched him. "I-"

"Thank you," she said, interrupting him before he could give her excuses or assure her he wasn't going to let Trixie get hurt playing with the stove, like she didn't know that already

He didn't say anything, just watched her, for a long moment, the tick in his jaw settling as his look shifted more toward something that was almost... grateful? She wasn't quite sure what that look meant, but it made her want to hug him.

She was about to do so when Trixie said, "Lucifer, the pancakes are burning."

"Ah," he said, quickly turning away from her to hopefully salvage the pancake. "Thank you, spawn."

Chloe whipped out her phone again, automatically justifying it with a vague idea of blackmail at a later date before she remembered that, oh yes, they were dating and taking cute pictures of your boyfriend and your daughter was allowed for no other reason than that they were cute. She didn't need to lie to herself anymore.

* * *

It was dark out and they were at the fair, Dan and Trixie having disappeared somewhere to go on "less boring" rides. It left Chloe and Lucifer alone, their hands clasped together, and Lucifer looking amazing in the jeans he had shown up wearing. They were in line for the ferris wheel, and her face hurt from smiling so much.

It wasn't a real date, not with Dan and Trixie there, but Lucifer still made it feel like one somehow. Even when he was indulging Trixie—handing her far too much money to go spend on tickets for games, letting her drag him on the tilt-a-whirl, conspiratorially buying her a second pack of gummies like Chloe didn’t know exactly what they were doing—he still made her feel like all of his attention was focused on her. It was like he was attuned to her every movement, glancing up whenever she started to smile at him and returning it, like he just _knew_.

"What, darling?" he asked when she had been silent and staring at him for too long.

"Nothing," she said. She hadn't thought her smile could grow wider, and yet it did as she added, "I'm just happy."

He blinked at her, the small smile he had been wearing every time he glanced her way growing too. "I'm also ‘just happy’," he said, and then it was their turn to get on the ride.

She snuggled into his side, leaning against him and sighing a little when he put his arm around her to pull her even closer. They were silent for the slow cycle to the top.

With the city laid out below them, she couldn't help but find herself saying, "It's so beautiful."

Sometimes, she forgot that, in the day to day of seeing the worst parts of it. There were so many good things in her life—she was truly blessed, and the thought had her almost snickering out loud—but sometimes there was a patina of gray over everything when she was involved in a particularly awful case.

She needed moments like these, sitting up and away from everything so she could see the whole view and not just the dirt under her feet.

"Yes, it is," Lucifer was murmuring, and she could tell. She could just _tell_ he was- 

"I swear, Lucifer," she said, and could feel a blush tinging her cheeks, "If you're being sappy and talking about me..."

She was sweaty and gross from being out in the summer heat all day, running around the fair with Trixie, and she knew her hair had escaped her ponytail and was sticking to her face, and she was just...

There was a beat of silence before he said, quiet and almost unsure, "And if I am?"

She laughed a little, chancing a look at him. He was staring at her with a small smile and eyes full of something she'd almost call love if she didn't know him better. Instead of responding, she leaned up and kissed him, soft like his smile. When she pulled back a little, he was still smiling, his eyes bright as he searched her face for something.

He must have found it, because he leaned in for another kiss, this one decidedly less soft, and she had to laugh and push him back a little. "Lucifer, we're surrounded by people. We can't."

"Not even a little bit of exhibitionist in you, darling?" he asked, calling her that for the second time in half an hour. She liked it. "No one's paying the slightest bit of attention to us up here."

She could feel herself almost giving in, but then the car was moving again, and she shook her head, still smiling. "No, now that I have you, I want you all to myself."

"You've always had me," he murmured, "from the moment you walked onto that crime scene."

She laughed, clearly a reaction he wasn't expecting if the puzzlement on his face was any indication, and settled against his shoulder again. "What a line."

"It's not- Well, alright, it's only a little bit of a line. It's a little bit true, too," he told her, pressing a kiss to her hair. "Did it work, then?"

She tilted her head up, meeting his lips, then pulling away just the tiniest bit and saying, "No."

He made a disappointed face, all but flopping back away from her, sending the cage rocking. She laughed, grabbing the bar in front of them and hanging on as it settled, her heart fluttering in time to it. All thoughts of being too clingy, of driving him away by _wanting_ fled to the back of her mind as he smiled and leaned to kiss her again. She couldn't remember the last time she had been this happy.

* * *

Chloe couldn't stop glancing to Lucifer's arms, and he knew it. She could see that he knew it. But who could blame her, with his sleeves rolled up like that, soapy water dripping off his hands as he cleaned up after their dinner. She didn't have anything else to do, not when he insisted she sit and relax and let him "take care of things," so she just watched.

"See something you like?" he asked, glancing her way with a smirk.

"Who wouldn't like someone else doing dishes for them," she said, returning his smirk. There was still a couple chips on her plate, and she idly dragged her finger through the salt that had fallen off them, meeting his gaze head on while she licked her finger clean.

His eyes darkened and he swallowed, glancing to the living room where Trixie was watching TV. It had taken months, but she'd finally got it firmly lodged in his head that she wasn't going to be swayed on the level of PDA that was acceptable in front of her daughter.

That didn't mean it wasn't fun to tease him once in a while, though.

He turned back to the dish he was rinsing, and she laughed a little as she got up to bring her plate to the sink.

"What's the matter?" she asked, bumping against his side affectionately.

"Nothing at all, Detective," he said. He didn't look at her, but she could see the small smile on his face, the slight flush to his features. It could be just the steam from the water, but she didn't think so. "I'm just following your rules."

"Mm." she said, bumping against him again before glancing to the living room to see if Trixie was paying attention. She couldn't keep the smile off her face. "Is that so."

"Something about scarring your spawn for life, I believe it was," he said.

"Yeah, something about that," she agreed. He shifted against her, a slight pressure against her side as he leaned into her as much as she was leaning into him.

"We certainly wouldn't want that." He was looking down at her, the small smile still firmly in place, and her heart felt full to bursting with how happy she was, how happy he made her.

"I love you," she said, the words slipping out before she could stop them.

He froze, staring at her, eyes wide. She had just long enough to strongly regret saying anything when he dropped the plate and fairly threw himself at her, kissing her with an intensity she wasn't sure she'd ever felt. It felt like being in the center of the sun, like being the focus of the universe. It was overwhelming and perfect and she didn't want the kiss to end.

"Gross!" Trixie's disgust had her grinning against his mouth, her hand on the back of his neck stopping him from pulling away. She could feel him smiling too, and his hands were trembling where he cupped her face.

It didn't occur to her until later, when they were already in bed, that he hadn't said it back. She wasn't that needy, didn't need to hear him say it to know that he loved her beyond all reason, but unease was prickling at the back of her neck. She shook it off as something she didn't need to worry about, and drifted to sleep.

In the morning, he was gone.


	2. Where Are You Now, Orpheus?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey remember that time I was super dumb and got mixed up on whether this was post-s2 or post-s3? It is definitely post-s3. Whoops.

When Lucifer didn’t show up to the crime scene that morning, Chloe didn’t worry. Sure, lately he had been letting her know if he was going to be busy, but he was still _Lucifer_. He could be flighty and capricious, and it wasn’t unheard of for him to just not show up. Especially if she was doing paperwork.

When he didn't show up that night for Taco Tuesday—something he never missed, not since the first time she officially invited him—she left him a voicemail, just to check on him. She wasn't worried, not yet. When Dan asked where he was, she just shrugged. Trixie's disappointed look had her making a mental note to request he tell them if he wasn't going to show up. It wasn't unreasonable now that they were dating, was it?

She was still nervous about tying him down too much, about making him feel trapped in their relationship when he was so used to being free to do what he pleased. They had talked about it, and he had assured her he felt "nothing of the sort," and if he did, he would tell her at once because, "Communication is key in a relationship, Detective."

(She hadn't asked where he got that from at the time, assuming it was Linda. It wasn't until she was snooping and found a self-help book on relationships that she realized maybe he was just as nervous about the whole thing as she was.)

He had been attentive and devoted, which did great things for her ego, but that couldn't last forever. She didn't quite feel like they were on borrowed time, but she wasn't going to be surprised if this was the end of the honeymoon period and they had to start actually working on being in love.

When she’d told him the night before that she loved him, she knew the expression on his face would be burned in her memory forever, all shock and awe, like he couldn't believe he had been blessed with such a gift. It broke her heart that he had gone so long—millennia—without knowing what it felt like to be loved. At the same time, a small, prideful piece of her reveled in being looked at like she was precious. Dan had never looked at her like that, not even at the start of their relationship, when they were young and so in love.

It had been nothing like this.

So, she wasn't worried, not even when he didn't return her call. She wasn't worried when he didn't show up for work the next day, telling herself that there were plenty of times when he'd not shown up for days at a time (there weren't), there were plenty of days when he didn't at least text her a bunch of emojis she couldn't decipher (there weren't), and plenty of times when he didn't return her calls (there weren't).

When Chloe went home that night, Trixie wanted to know where Lucifer was. It was a bit of a shock to realize they'd been spending so much time together that Trixie just expected him to arrive with her, now. It hadn't felt like that much until he was absent.

When he wasn't waiting in her kitchen the next morning with breakfast ready and wasn't waiting for her outside to drive them in and wasn't waiting for her at the station when she got there, she had to admit that maybe something was wrong. Hopefully he had just gotten... distracted. He was distractible; something she often put to good use now that they were dating. A simple press of her lips against his cheek was sometimes enough to render him speechless for a moment, before he leered and made a suggestive comment she would shoot down half the time.

It was like he sometimes forgot he was allowed touches beyond a hand at the small of her back or on her cheek, and that she was allowed the same in turn. There was so much about him she hadn't known—so many more important things than that he actually was the Devil—and every time she found out a new way he wasn't used to simple human affection, she vowed to make sure he never went without again.

She wasn’t sure where she thought he had gone, but a tiny piece of her—a piece that hadn’t been able to fully let go of her reservations when it came to being in a relationship with him—was worried he had become… distracted by other people. He hadn’t given her any indication that he would do that, but…

She tried to keep a piece of herself hard, so that if (when) that happened she wasn't completely destroyed by it. But it had been a good couple of months, and she was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, she would be enough for him.

Of all the things she expected to be greeted with when the elevator doors opened on his penthouse, emptiness and silence wasn't on the list. She tried to tell herself that maybe he was just out, but the penthouse had the feel of something that had been abandoned. There were empty spots at the bar. Select books were gone, and his wardrobe was conspicuously empty.

The last time this had happened, everything had been covered in white sheets and her heart had stopped the instant the elevator doors opened. At the time, it had seemed like the ultimate betrayal. They were moving forward, and he had just disappeared.

But this. This was so much worse.

Her eyes burned as she made her way through the place, but she refused to cry. This was what she had been waiting for, wasn’t it? For him to run, or get bored, or _something_? Because it had all been too good to be true, hadn’t it? She had known this was going to happen, somewhere in the back of her mind, but somehow that didn’t make it hurt any less.

This was what he did, after all. Two steps forward, one step back. How many times was she willing to go through this? Was this because she told him that she loved him? Did he decide to run because things got too intense too fast? She should have kept her fucking mouth shut and waited for him to say something first. Hell, he hadn't even said it back to her; he'd just dove in for a long kiss. Like he was trying to distract her. While she thought she’d been able to feel his love for her in that kiss, she could have been wrong. Must have been wrong.

She was so stupid.

As she meandered her way back out, the hurt began to give way to anger. How dare he? How dare he just up and leave, when she was so used to him being there, when Trixie had become used to him being there? Trixie was going to be devastated, and there was nothing Chloe could do about it.

Except…

She found herself doubling back to search for something, anything, that would indicate there had been some kind of foul play. Something that would tell her he hadn’t cut and run. Something that would tell her she hadn’t misjudged him so terribly.

But no. There were no signs of struggle. He had taken more things than he had last time he disappeared, including most of his favorite books and at least one bottle of his favorite whiskey. There was _nothing_.

She really wished he was there, just so she could slap him. How dare he do this to her again? He had promised that he wouldn't. Maybe not in so many words, but they had talked about Candy, and he had _apologized_. Had he even meant it, or had he just been biding his time until it was all too much, and he could run again?

Her finger hovered over his name in her phone. She could call him, give his voicemail a piece of her mind. But it would be so, so much more satisfying to do it to his face, to make him tell her _to her face_ that he couldn’t do this. It was the absolute least he could do, instead of just disappearing.

In a snap decision, instead of calling him, she scrolled down and hit Maze's contact.

It took a few rings for her to answer, and Chloe was almost about to hang up and just... accept that he was gone. Again. "What's up, Decker?"

"Hey," Chloe said, walking back to the bar and pulling down some top-shelf whiskey. "Have you heard from Lucifer?"

There was a long silence. Things were... better with Maze and Lucifer, but they weren't exactly _good_ yet. Just when Chloe was about to check if the call had dropped, Maze said, "No. Why?"

"He's gone," she said, internally cursing the waver in her voice. "He's just. Gone."

"I'll gut him," Maze growled. "I'm going to fucking _gut him_ and make him eat his entrails."

Chloe knew she shouldn't feel so warmed by a threat of violence that had a good chance of being acted on, but she did anyway. "Not if I get to him first," she said. The burning was back in her eyes, and her voice broke when she asked, "Can you find him for me?"

Maze was silent, and then said, "So you can gut him, right? Not so you can give him a second chance or something dumb like that?"

"I want him to tell me to my face that it's over and then I don’t want to see him again," she said as tears started to trickle down her face. It would feel so good to slap him, maybe twice, but the idea of never seeing him again made her stomach churn.

"I'll put some feelers out," Maze said, and added, discomfort dripping from every word, "Listen, he's an asshole. You didn't deserve this, okay?"

Chloe's laugh was watery. "I know," she said, and it was only half a lie.

* * *

Chloe knew that she had to break the news to Trixie that Lucifer wasn't coming back, but she couldn't bring herself to do it yet. Maybe after she talked to him and made sure that he wasn't going to just show up again one day and try to worm his way back into their lives. It was easier, with Dan, something she wouldn't have guessed. He held her when she started to cry and didn't try to make it about him or their relationship.

If someone had told her a year ago that Dan would be one of her best friends again, she would have called a 5150 on them.

It took a couple of days, but when Maze called her back, her voice was different.

"Decker," she said. "You're not going to like this."

Chloe swallowed hard. "Did he get married again?"

"Not exactly," Maze said, something in her voice that Chloe couldn't quite place. "Look, you're human. There's nothing you can do about this; do you really want to know?"

An icy trickle of fear dripped down Chloe's spine. When Maze started talking about her humanity, nothing good ever followed. But she couldn't stand to not know. "Yes."

Just when the quiet began to grow unbearable, Maze started to talk. "He's in Hell—"

"_What_?" Chloe exclaimed. Of all the places… she had driven him back to Hell? That didn't even make sense; Lucifer had always been adamant that he wasn't going to be going back any time soon. What could possibly have driven him back there?

"Rumor on the street is there's a new Lord of Hell, and he wasn't pleased with Lucifer being on Earth." Chloe finally identified the emotion in Maze's voice, and it wasn't a surprise that she hadn't been able to before. It wasn't often that Maze sounded afraid.

"Is he going to be coming for you?" She couldn't put a protective detail on Maze, not when there was something that could take over Hell coming for her. It would slaughter whatever was in its way, and she couldn't have that on her conscience.

Maze's silence was damning.

"Okay," Chloe said. "Okay, we need to ... What do we need to do?"

She couldn't think about Lucifer being trapped in Hell, being tortured both by himself and by demons. God, she had just assumed the worst of him. How could she have done that? Things had been going so well between them; she should have given him the benefit of the doubt instead of just abandoning him. Like she assumed he had done to her.

Was him being in Hell like a cop being in jail? He had put so much effort into not returning; the idea of him being dragged back unwillingly horrified her.

"For me?" Maze asked. It was unfair how surprised she sounded, like it still hadn't sunk in that she was Chloe's friend, and Chloe would do anything for her friends. Instead of continuing, Maze was silent, and Chloe realized she was waiting for confirmation.

"Yes, Maze," she said, trying to focus on the immediate concern of Maze and not what Lucifer was going through. "For you."

"Nothing," Maze said. "I can take care of myself."

Chloe sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, walking over to the sink to get a glass of water. Maze's insistence that she had to do everything herself was almost too much to deal with right now. But she had to do something.

"Yeah, but you don't have to," she said, even though she could practically hear Maze shaking her head.

"No, Decker, it's not something you can help with. Look, just... Just forget about us, okay? Live your life and—"

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Chloe snapped. "I'm not _forgetting_ about you, Maze, what the fuck?"

"It would be—"

"No, it would not be _better_." Chloe took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, then drained the glass of water, wishing it was something stronger. "What do you need?"

Silence fell again. When Maze spoke, her voice was far gentler than Chloe had ever heard it. "There's nothing you can do, Decker. You know I was Lucifer's right-hand woman, right? I was at the top, above all the rest of the demons." She paused. "Beelzebub was his left-hand man."

"If he had you, why would he even need someone else?" Chloe couldn't stop herself from asking. Lucifer hadn't told her any of this. She had asked him so many questions, and he had answered them all truthfully, but it had never occurred for her to ask if there was another Maze to do their dirty work. How did the Lord of Hell even have dirty work that would need someone who wasn't Maze?

"Don't ask me that," Maze said darkly. "Just leave it. The point is, Beelzebub has taken over in his place. And Lucifer is still a threat, so he did something about that."

Chloe swallowed, a sudden bad feeling in her throat. "Is Lucifer dead?"

Maze was quiet for too long. "I don't think so," she finally said, seeming to know what Chloe meant.

That was not the confident "no" that Chloe had been looking for. "So, what do we do?"

"Decker..."

"I can't just leave him there, Maze. I _can't_." She closed her eyes, trying not to remember the look on Lucifer's face during a late-night conversation about the times he had died for her. Something she still wasn't over. He had _died_ for her. More than once. How could she have ever thought he would just leave? "I need to go get him."

"You can't," Maze said, but Chloe wasn't willing to accept that.

"I can't not," she said, desperate. "He would do the same for me."

"Yeah," Maze said, "But he wouldn't want you to do it for him. Even if you get into Hell, even if you make it all the way to him, even if you get him out, there's no guarantee you'll be able to get back out."

Chloe's instinct was to say that that didn't matter, that she'd suffer the consequences if only it meant that there was a chance Lucifer could be free again. But it wasn't just her that she needed to think about. "Trixie," she breathed. She couldn't leave Trixie, not if she didn't know if she was going to be coming home. She couldn't make her daughter grow up motherless; it wasn't fair, and Trixie had to come first.

"Maze," she said, her voice breaking as tears began to drip down her cheeks.

"I know," Maze said. "Like I said, he wouldn't want you to. And..." She drifted off until Chloe prompted her to continue. "And _I_ don't want you to. You have no idea what it's like down there."

"This isn't fair," Chloe said. She sniffed, wiped at her eyes, and tried to get herself under control before she woke up Trixie. It wasn't working.

"Not much is." Maze was matter-of-fact when she said it, like it wasn't important that life wasn't fair. Like she didn't expect anything different. Chloe could just hear Lucifer saying it in the same tone of voice, and her heart ached for both of them.

There was a scuffle on the other end of the line, and then Maze said, "I gotta go."

She hung up before Chloe could say anything, and Chloe found herself just standing there, dead air on the phone, while she stared at the wall and cried. Was it really too much to ask that they be allowed to be happy together, just for a little while? Two months wasn't nearly long enough. It wasn't _fair_.

"Mommy?" Chloe whirled around, dashing the tears off her face and swallowing the sobs that wanted to escape as she did, to see Trixie standing behind her, looking far too awake to have just gotten up. How long had she been listening? "When's Lucifer coming back?"

Chloe opened her mouth to answer, to reassure her, to _lie_, but instead she found herself saying, "I don't know, baby. I don't know."

Trixie's lip quivered, and then she started to cry, loud the way only a child could be. Chloe folded her into her arms and silently wept for all that she had lost.

* * *

Grief was a funny thing. Sometimes, Chloe almost forgot that Lucifer was gone, where he was, and what was happening to him. Sometimes she was almost happy, and when she came back to herself, when she settled back into her grief, the brief happiness only made her guilt grow.

She couldn't save him. The one time he needed to be saved, after all the times he had saved her, she couldn't do it. It was a cruel trick of the universe to have him whisked away to a place she couldn't follow. Had he been anywhere on Earth, _anywhere_, she would have put a team together and gone after him. She would have gone after him alone if she had to. And instead, she was sitting on the couch, watching a movie with her daughter, doing _nothing_ while he suffered.

Sometimes it was all she could do to pretend to be okay. The guys at the station, knowing Lucifer wasn't coming in anymore but not knowing _why_, were all careful around her, like she was going to break. The worst part was, she couldn't say that they were wrong.

It killed her that she couldn't tell Ella what was going on, beyond that it wasn't his fault and she shouldn't blame him. She'd suffered through more hugs in the past week than Ella had doled out in the past year. It was a lot.

At least Linda knew everything and was so much better at emotions than, well. Than either Maze or Chloe was. She kept telling Chloe the grief would pass in time, that the guilt was misplaced. But Chloe could see in her eyes that she was lying, and it ate at her. How could she live with herself knowing that she didn't even try?

The three of them—Linda and Ella and Maze—took Chloe out for drinks once and only once. It turned out she was a weepy drunk, and the less said about that, the better. A weepy drunk, and a loose-lipped drunk. It wasn't until the morning after that Chloe realized just how much she had spilled the night before, and how Ella had taken it.

"Look," Ella said after pulling Chloe into her lab. She stuck her head out the door and looked both ways, then shut it firmly and locked it. "I know Lucifer used to be part of some crime family or something, okay? And that he's been trying to break away from them. I'm not an idiot! But Chloe, if he's been kidnapped by a rival gang or whatever ... You need to tell someone. He needs help!"

Chloe could feel her bottom lip wobbling. "It's not that easy," she said, unable to look Ella in the eye. Ella was so earnest about everything, so confident in her faith. Sometimes, Chloe was envious of how she didn't seem to carry around the ugly parts of life. They touched her, and she made her peace with them, and then she let them go.

"What?" Ella asked, indignant, before she softened with a whispered, "Oh no."

Chloe glanced at her, fighting tears and grimacing when she saw the look of horror on Ella's face.

"Are they threatening Trixie?" Ella asked, which wasn't quite what Chloe had expected. She wasn't sure what she had expected, just that it wasn't that. It hadn't even occurred to her that Trixie might be in danger.

"I—Yes," she said. "Yeah."

"Okay, but, you can get police protection! All you have to do is—"

Ella looked so excited that Chloe almost felt bad interrupting her. "You know that police protection is a joke half the time, Ella; you work with the damn police."

"Yeah, but—" she started, but Chloe couldn't let her finish, couldn't _stand_ to let her finish.

"No." She used her Mom voice, which usually worked on Ella, but there was a stubborn set to her jaw that had Chloe scrabbling to explain. "Look, I—" She swallowed. "It's not something the police can get involved in, okay?"

Ella looked uncertain, but she slowly nodded, apparently willing to accept what Chloe was bullshitting. "But maybe you could ..."

"I can't," Chloe snapped. "Don't you think I want to? Don't you think I'd give _anything_ to get him back safe? But I can't, okay; there's no guarantee I'd survive and I can't leave Trixie alone like that. I can't just throw away my life when I have her to think about."

"Um, no? Not okay?" Ella said. Chloe jerked back like she'd been slapped, and Ella's expression softened. "How many times have you almost died on the job, Chloe? I ..." Ella closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, they shone with unshed tears. "I can't tell you to go get him back. You should be getting the police involved. But ... If he's still-" her voice cracked on that “-alive, you can't just leave him there. Someone needs to mount a rescue mission."

"Ella..." Chloe stepped forward, opening her arms, and Ella all but collapsed into them, hugging her hard enough that she almost couldn't breathe. For such a tiny person, she packed a lot of strength. "I know that you don't understand, but this is different."

"Why?" It was the one question Chloe had been dreading. Because was it really different? Was it any different from the time she was poisoned, or the time Malcolm kidnapped Trixie and they both almost died, or any of the numerous other times she had been in imminent danger of dying in her years as a cop?

The question was something she'd been wrestling with off and on as the guilt and grief ate away at her. She couldn't just leave Trixie, but if there was a chance she was going to come back, if it wasn't certain death she was facing, then was it any different than being a cop?

And, technically, she would be doing her job, wouldn't she? Maybe it wasn’t a homicide, but she was a detective and that meant solving crimes. Lucifer had been kidnapped, which was a crime, which made finding and punishing the kidnapper sort of part of her job. (Or dead, her brain helpfully supplied. Punished or dead, and in this case, dead would be better.)

"I can't explain it," Chloe finally said. "You just have to trust me that this is different."

Ella's gaze was uncertain as she stepped back, and her cheeks were wet with tears, but she nodded resolutely, clenching her jaw. "I don't get it, okay, I don’t. But I can't make you do anything."

"I know," Chloe said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Ella told her. "Just ... just think about it, okay? Before it's too late."

That was part of the problem, though, wasn't it? Would it ever be too late? Could Lucifer die in Hell? Die as in be obliterated? Would God allow that?

God probably didn't give a rat's ass what happened to his son, and the thought had Chloe gritting her teeth with anger. This was something He could fix in an instant. She wouldn't have to be angsting over whether to abandon Lucifer or not.

That was the thing, though, wasn't it? She _would_ be abandoning him. She knew what it felt like to be abandoned. The idea of Lucifer suffering the torment he was suffering down there, coupled with knowing that she wasn't going to save him—because, of course, he wouldn't expect her to do this, he wouldn't want her to do this—was almost too much to bear.

"What if," she said slowly, "the chance of both of us dying is something like 80-20."

Ella smiled a small, sad smile. "I think you've both beaten the odds so many times that it's still in your favor. And that you should really report this to someone and bring backup."

"Yeah," Chloe said thoughtfully. Maybe... "I don't think I can bring backup where I'm going."


	3. Ain't Easy Walkin'

"I'm going to do it, Maze."

"What? No!" Maze sounded genuinely shocked and appalled that Chloe was even considering it. There was a loud thump on the other end of the line, and then, "You can't, Decker; I thought we already agreed on that."

"I can't not," she said simply, shrugging even though Maze couldn't see her. "I... Ella said something the other day, and I can't get it out of my head. I have to try."

Maze cursed in a language that almost hurt to hear, then said, "You _can't_."

Trixie's door was ajar, and Chloe peered through it to make sure her daughter was still occupied with barbies and not listening in. The light fell across Trixie’s face, and, for a moment, Chloe was breathless with how much she loved her, with what she would be giving up if she died. But she couldn't live like this, always wondering, always knowing that Lucifer was still alive somewhere, being tortured and tormented in possibly literal ways. Ella had been right. It wasn't any different from what she did on a daily basis, and they _were_ lucky, luckier than they had any right to be.

Of course, how much of that had been Lucifer and his powers? How much of that relied on the two of them working together? She would be alone for half the journey, minimum, and her luck before she'd met Lucifer had never been anything special.

"I have to," she said simply. "I have to, and you need to tell me how to get to him."

"No."

"Maze."

"_No_."

"Maze, I have to. I'm going to figure it out with or without your help."

Maze growled—literally growled—and spat, "You have to _die_, Chloe. Don't you get it? You're human; the only way to get to Hell is to die, and there's no guarantee you would even go there in the first place."

Chloe was quiet, thinking it through. That was a wrinkle in her plan. If she died, was there a way to get back? Lucifer did it, but he wasn't human, and she didn't think he had needed a body. She couldn't just come back and take over someone else's body. But... 80-20.

She was stubborn, she knew that. Her dad had always told her it would both do her good in life and get her in trouble if she didn't learn to direct it to the right places. Her stubbornness was what had made her stick to being a cop after the horrible first week of working at the station and the seemingly interminable period of time between Palmetto and Lucifer coming into her life. Her stubbornness was what got her through the Academy. Would this be putting it to good use or would this be just asking for trouble?

And did she care?

"Guilt is what sends you to Hell, right?" she asked. Maze made a cautious, wordless noise of assent. "I have plenty of that."

"It's not-"

"I'm doing this," Chloe said, shutting her eyes and leaning against the wall by the door to Trixie's room. "I can't spend the rest of my life wondering what if and regretting that I never tried." She swallowed and eyed her gun safe. "I'd like it if you helped me, but I'm still doing it, even if you won't."

"Fucking ... _Damn it_!" Maze yelled. "Why can't you just let it go?"

"I can't," Chloe said. "I just can't. He would—he _has_—done the same for me. More than once. I can't just... leave him there, and I don't know if I can look Trixie in the eye in ten years and tell her that no, Lucifer's not dead, I just never tried to get him back."

"Why do you have to tell her at all?" Maze asked. "Why can't you just ... forget about him?"

The very idea made Chloe gasp in pain. Sometimes, Maze was so alien that Chloe wasn't sure how she had never noticed that she wasn't human before. "Could you?'

"If I were you? Yes!"

"Then I guess it's a good thing you're not me."

The silence on the other end was deafening, and Chloe almost regretted saying it. Almost.

"I'd do it for you," Chloe said softly when it became clear Maze wasn't going to say anything but wasn't going to hang up, either. "And I can't spend the rest of my life worrying that he's going to come for you, too."

Maze made a disgusted noise and said, "You're too good for us."

"No such thing," Chloe said, holding back her sigh of relief. "You'll help me—"

"No," Maze said. Chloe ground her teeth and almost started shouting, but Maze kept talking. "There might be a way for you to get into Hell. No human has ever survived it, but you..." She snorted. "If anyone can survive it, it's you."

"So, I don't have to die," Chloe said, a bright frisson of relief running through her.

"No, but there's a good chance you will anyway," Maze said. Chloe knew she was being reckless, that she was acting like Lucifer, and that if he heard her thinking _that_ he would make a comment about him rubbing off on her, and she would smack him, and-

She missed him so much. She had to try, even if she ended up having to turn back and couldn't rescue him. If she didn't try at all, she would never be able to forgive herself.

"Okay," Maze said. "If you're not going to change your mind, I can give you directions. I-" Chloe heard her swallow, and when she started talking again, she sounded darkly furious. "I can't come with you. I've used it before, and it's a path you can only travel once. You'll need my knives."

"Whoa, wait," Chloe said, holding up a hand like they were in the same room. "I don't know how to fight with knives. I'd just end up hurting myself."

"Yeah, well, it's better than having a useless gun. Your bullets would barely tickle some of the things you could run into down there. And Lucifer would kill me if I let you go in unarmed. Look, I'm a four-hour drive away. This bounty is bullshit anyway. I'll bring them to you, and you make sure this is something you really want to do."

"Okay," Chloe said. She wasn't going to change her mind. "Four hours."

* * *

She needed to say goodbye to Trixie, and she had four hours to do it. It wasn’t nearly enough.

Her eyes burned with tears as she watched her monkey laying on the floor with a coloring book and crayons spread all around. She couldn’t- Was she a terrible mother for doing this?

She knelt down beside Trixie, who looked up at her with a toothy grin. “Hi Mom!”

“Hey monkey.” Chloe fell silent, watching as Trixie colored in a princess dress, staying neatly inside the lines. She was growing up so fast, and the idea that Chloe might miss the rest of it—might never see her go to middle school, or her first high school dance, might never see her off to college and cry as she walked down the aisle at her wedding—had her dashing tears off her cheeks before Trixie could notice them.

“I need to go away for a bit, monkey,” she finally said. “You’re going to stay with Daddy while I’m gone. He’s going to be here in a little while to help you pack up some things, okay?”

“Where are you going?”

Trixie’s big eyes were full of curiosity and nothing more. She wasn’t worried that her mother might not come back, because in her world, her mother always came back from trips.

“Lucifer’s in trouble, and I need to go help him,” Chloe said. “I love you so much.”

“Lucifer’s coming back?” Trixie asked, sitting up and giving Chloe her full attention.

“I don’t know,” Chloe answered honestly. She couldn’t bring herself to tell Trixie that she might not be coming back, let alone Lucifer. She didn’t want her to worry, wanted her to be happy for as long as possible, no matter the outcome.

“Oh.” Trixie sounded so sad at that Chloe wanted to make her empty promises. She wouldn’t, but oh how she wanted to. “Doesn’t he know we miss him?”

“I think he does, baby. But he might not be able to come back with me.” It wasn’t a lie.

“Oh.” Trixie heaved a sigh and then said, with the conviction only a child could have, “I know you’ll bring him back, Mom.”

“Thanks, baby,” Chloe said, smiling through the tears that wanted to fall. “Now, what are you coloring? Can I help?”

She had four hours. She was going to make the most of them.

* * *

There were going to be three challenges—four, if Chloe counted getting to the entrance—and Maze couldn't tell her anything about what they would be.

"They change based on the person," Maze had said. "Lucifer thought he was being clever."

Of course, he had. The flight had been long, and customs exhausting. The climb was much, much harder than the rock wall at the Academy, and she almost fell to her death more than once. By the time she reached the entrance to the cave, her heart pounded with exertion and adrenaline.

Her backpack felt like it was filled with lead weights instead of batteries, water, and food rations as she stood staring into the darkness of the cave. Light didn't penetrate it, the bright sunlight swallowed as soon as it passed over the threshold. A chill draft came from it, flowing over her and cooling the sweat on her skin. There was an invisible line on the ground where no plant life crossed over, and when she stepped close, the birdsong around her faded into nothing. It was dramatic and over the top, and so like Lucifer that she wanted to cry.

She switched on the flashlight and was dismayed to find that it only lit the ground a few feet in front of her. The darkness crowded in like a physical presence, blanketing everything except the tiny beam of her flashlight. It reminded her of something out of one of those dumb horror books Trixie always tried to get her to buy. Chloe remembered reading them herself when she was Trixie's age, and being scared shitless.

Trixie. Chloe had her phone on her, but it was turned off to conserve battery. She almost turned it on, so she could take one more look at her daughter—the most recent picture from Chloe dropping her off with Dan a scant twelve hours ago—but held back. If she saw Trixie now, she was almost certain she'd turn back, and she had to keep going.

She started down the passage, grimacing as it grew steeper and narrower the further she walked. There were noises in the darkness beyond her flashlight, skitterings and slitherings that had her picturing all manner of beasts. They were probably just snakes and rats, and she'd dealt with her fair share of those in the past, but this _was_ a road to Hell. (She had plenty of good intentions to pave it with.) The deeper she got, the closer the walls came, the louder the sounds got. And no matter where she swung her flashlight, she could never see anything.

She brushed her way through a spiderweb, recoiling at the feel of it over her hands and arms and scrubbing at them viciously once she was through.

The tunnel grew warmer as she went down, almost imperceptibly heating up until she found herself sweating from more than just the hike. She was thirsty but didn't pause to get out one of the water bottles. She needed to ration it—Maze had been unclear on how long the journey would take—and it was far too soon to be breaking into it.

Even if she had decided to take a couple sips of water, she couldn't have gotten to her backpack if she tried; the tunnel had narrowed so dramatically that the sides of her arms were scraping roughly against the walls. If the passage got any smaller, she would need to back out and try to find another way in. _It's not the same as giving up_, she told herself, even though Maze had been clear that this was the only way in that didn't involve death.

Now would be a real bad time to discover she was claustrophobic.

Blood started to drip down her arm after a particularly sharp piece of the wall scraped across it, and she considered trying to get to the first aid kit in her backpack. Then she froze, suddenly conscious of a deep silence. The only sound breaking that silence was the irregular drips of her blood on the floor. Where had the sounds of animals moving through the darkness beyond her flashlight gone? And how long had they been gone before she noticed?

The air was heavy and the hairs on the back of her neck began to rise. Between the silence and the sudden taste of brimstone in the air, her cop sense was working overtime. A predator was coming; something her instincts recognized as more dangerous than she. With her free hand, Chloe slid one of Maze's knives out of its sheath and held it the way Maze had shown her in the brief lesson she had given.

Chloe pushed her way forward, walls closing in on her until she was angled slightly and could feel rocks cutting into her shirt and pants, and her skin below those. A sound was growing, a whispering that sounded almost like words, but she couldn't quite catch what was being said. She shivered in the heat, fear-tinged sweat dripping down the back of her neck.

The walls were getting too close for her to push through and the whispering was getting louder—but no more intelligible—and her flashlight was still only illuminating a foot or two in front of her. She wasn't sure how long she'd been walking, only knowing that she was already tired, thirsty, and hurting. Still, she pressed on, even knowing it was past the point where she should have started trying to back out. Even knowing that she was in danger of already being stuck with nowhere to go but forward.

With a last wrenching movement and muffled scream of pain as a burning heat tore through her shoulder, she stumbled out into a vast cavern. She could see across it, a glow emanating from somewhere all around the empty space. The whispering noise had grown so loud it was almost deafening, and it seemed to be coming from across the cavern. She could see a black hole in the wall almost directly across from her, where the glow seemed to be sucked out of existence.

Her arms throbbed with a thousand small scrapes, and she could feel a breeze coming from the tunnel behind her against the skin of her legs through the rips in her pants. It was a hot breeze, doing nothing to cool her, and it hadn't been there while she was pushing her way through the rock. There was nothing she could do about the cuts—they were too minor to waste her first aid supplies on—so she turned off her flashlight and jammed it in her pocket, starting across the empty expanse at the same time.

She nearly jumped out of her skin when a deep voice said, "Well what do we have here?" from right next to her when she was barely halfway across. Instinct had her reaching for the gun that wasn't there, her fingers encountering the cold metal of Maze's blade, as she turned and stepped back.

She looked up, and up some more. Next to her was a tall, skeletal demon, covered in ragged, torn skin that hung off his- Its? Bones like weathered clothing. He had horns coming from his forehead, one jagged and broken, the other coming to a wickedly sharp point. The blades in her hands felt heavy and awkward, even as she shifted into the stance Maze had shown her.

After her short lesson in fighting with knives, Maze had taken the blades back and muttered something over them in the same painful language she had been swearing in on the phone, drawing her thumb down each of them at the same time. A trickle of blood had run down her hand as she handed them to Chloe, and she'd brought it to her mouth to suck the blood off. Chloe had grimaced and looked down, inspecting the blades, expecting to see blood lining their edges, but there was nothing, like they'd fed on what was there and left nothing behind.

"It's all I can do," Maze had said, eyes dark with regret. "I'm... I'm sorry." She'd scowled angrily. "Try not to get yourself killed."

And then she was gone.

"Well, little human?" The demon in front of her said. "Are you ready to die?"

She didn't answer, tightening her grip on the blades and shifting her weight in preparation for it to spring. After staring at her, a sick smile on its ghoulish face, it took a lazy swipe at her with its claws, and she jumped back. Maze's blades were heavy in her hands, and she didn't know what to do, how to get in close enough to kill ("They're just demons, Decker. Kill them before they kill you. I'm not coming after you if your sorry ass ends up dead.") without getting herself gutted.

It pressed the advantage until she was backed up against the wall, heat seeping through her sweaty shirt and into her bones. The stone was too damn hot to stay against for long, and the demon had silently sauntered to within arm’s reach, if she just threw herself forward a bit, so she did, striking with the knives at the same time. It felt like a wild flail to her, but the knives seemed to almost know where to go, how to hit to cause damage. Her arms were just along for the ride.

She sent a brief prayer of gratitude to Maze as the demon's eyes went wide with surprise before it wobbled on its feet and keeled over, two gaping slits running down its chest and through its lungs. Apparently even demons needed to breathe, because it didn't get up. The entire encounter had taken barely five minutes, but she was still panting, her mouth dry. The oppressive dry heat made every step feel like a war within her body as she crossed the rest of the cavern.

The archway of the opening the cave wall loomed ahead of her, easily double her height and pitch dark. Expecting another tunnel, she stepped through only to find herself on the banks of a rushing river. Flickering torches placed at long intervals stretched in either direction along it. The whispering made sense, as she watched the water roil past, a sense of hopelessness filling her. There was no way she could cross that on her own; she'd just be swept away. Maybe there was a bridge.

As she walked, a growing thirst filled her. It would be so easy to lay at the edge of the river, cup her hands, and drink the cool water until she was sated. She could save the water in her pack for later, when there wasn't access to free water right there. It was so tempting.

("Don't eat or drink anything anyone offers you while you're there," Maze had told her. "Not unless you want to stay down there forever.")

She realized she had stopped and was just staring at the water and shook her head sharply. No, she couldn't drink from it, but she could take a sip from her pack. She shrugged it off and unzipped, pulling a bottle out and cracking it open. The mouthful of water she took was lukewarm and not refreshing at all, but it wet her parched throat and she figured it would do.

When she looked up from putting the bottle back and looked down the bank, there was an old woman hunched over an even older rowboat by the river. With a strength that belied her age, she heaved the boat into the current as Chloe watched, nothing but a thin rope keeping it tethered to shore.

She could swear that neither the woman nor the boat had been there before she had drunk the water. Was she an illusion? Was it some mirage caused by dehydration?

As she approached, she could hear the woman muttering under her breath, the actual words covered by the rushing of the river. For a moment, she just stood there, next to the woman and the boat, feeling a little foolish. If this was an illusion, she was going to look like an idiot to... well, there was no one else that she could see in either direction, so she supposed it was just herself.

"Excuse me," she said. "Will that boat cross the river?"

The woman looked up. Her face was haggard and weathered, dark and wrinkled with a surprising amount of laugh lines spreading from her eyes.

"Of course, dear," she said, straightening out of her hunch. She was taller than Chloe, but not by much. "It wouldn't be much of a boat if it didn't, now, would it?"

Chloe laughed a little, breathless from the heat and the walk. "I can't pay you," she said, thinking of the myths she'd learned in grade school, "but could you give me a ride across?"

The woman shook her head. "I'm sorry, dear, but the rapids are too strong."

Chloe blinked. "I thought you said it could get across."

"Aye." The woman nodded, white hair falling into her eyes before she scraped it back.

"So why can't... Never mind." Chloe shook her head. "I have water in my backpack, it's not much, but would you trade a ride for a couple bottles of water?"

The woman shook her head again. "I'm sorry, dear, but I have plenty of water here." She pointed to the river. It still looked like it would be cool and refreshing, and Chloe found herself licking her lips.

There might be a bridge of some kind upstream. She might even come across another person with a boat. But if there wasn't, if she didn't, she would have given up her only chance to get across the river. She had no doubt that if she walked away, when she turned around, the woman wouldn't be there anymore.

The woman was waiting patiently, watching her with regret in her eyes. "You should turn around and go home," she said. "There's nothing for you here."

"I can't," Chloe said immediately. "I can't leave him here."

"Ah," the woman said. She nodded, understanding coming over her features. "You're here for love."

Chloe shrugged and nodded. She was here because her conscience wouldn't let her rest if she didn't at least try to get Lucifer back. And her conscience wouldn't let her rest because she loved him. She had to get to him, and whatever came after that, they could fight together and get home. But if she couldn't get across this river...

"You know this never works," the woman said, shaking her head. "Love is never enough, no matter what they've told you."

"I still have to try," Chloe said, but doubt was starting to creep through her, tendrils of uncertainty worming through her thoughts. She could turn around, walk right back out of the tunnel, climb down the cliff, and go home to her family. She didn't need to do this. She-

But he would do it for her. That was the thought that kept her circling back. He would do it for her, and she could do no less for him. Could love him no less. She could turn back and say she had made a good faith effort, tell Maze and Linda that it had been impossible, tell Ella and Dan something that they'd believe, tell Trixie...

She closed her eyes for a moment. What could she tell Trixie? That Lucifer was just gone and never coming back? That she had tried to go after him but had failed? No, she couldn't fail at this. Lucifer deserved more. Trixie deserved to not grieve for someone she loved. Lucifer's face flashed across her memory, the wonder the first time she'd asked him on a date etched permanently in her memory. That wasn't a face that deserved spending an eternity in Hell.

"_Please_," she said, letting the desperation she felt color her voice. "Will you take me across?"

The woman grinned, showing too many teeth, and Chloe almost stepped backwards. "Yes, yes I will."

She hadn't realized how tense she was until the woman said that and she slumped with relief, all of the strength going out of her muscles all at once. "_Thank you_."

She almost fell into the water getting into the boat, and the woman was no help to her, already sitting with the oars in her hands. She just waited, watching Chloe almost overbalance with a patient smile and a knowing gaze. Once she was seated and gripping the edges of the boat hard enough that her knuckles were white, the woman undid the rope and they set off down the choppy river.

Chloe quickly discovered that by boat was not her preferred method of travel, especially not on a river that was one stop away from being white water rapids. She was careful not to open her mouth, careful not to lick her lips even as the water sprayed in her face. It, too, was warm, doing nothing to cool her.

When they finally docked, and Chloe pried her fingers off the edges of the boat, she realized they were directly across from the archway she had used to enter the cavern. The walk upriver had seemed much longer than it must have been. Once safely on the bank of the river, she wiped off her face with the bottom of her shirt and turned back to thank the woman.

Both she and the dock were gone.

Chloe stared at the water for a moment before shaking off her unease and turning back to face the wall. There was a doorway a couple feet down from her and nothing but an unbroken expanse of rock going in the other direction, so she moved for the door and cautiously went through.

On the other side she froze, teetering at the edge of a great chasm. She pressed back against the wall where there had been a door mere seconds ago. The chasm extended as far as the eye could see in either direction, and she couldn't make out the opposite side, no matter how she squinted.

The edge, barely enough for her to walk down, seemed to stay the same width, bulging outward and inward with the changes of the wall. She picked a direction, carefully turned, and started walking.

It didn't take long for her to realize that she should have had something to drink in the river cavern before she moved on. Her throat was parched, so dried out her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. If the path were just the tiniest bit wider, she would go for her backpack. Instead, she focused on putting one foot in front of the other, on ignoring the dehydration headache that had started at some point. The dry heat was oppressive and the air still as a tomb.

She didn't want this to be her tomb.

After an indeterminable length of time—long enough that the front of her shirt had soaked through with sweat but not long enough that she passed out from heat exhaustion, and that was something, she figured—she thought she saw a bridge in the distance. She picked up her pace only for her foot to slip out from under her with a crunch of gravel and small stones rattling to the bottom of the chasm, nearly sending her tumbling over the edge.

She managed to get her balance back and stopped short, breathing heavy, her heart pounding in her chest. An almost refreshing cold sweat broke out across her back. She couldn't stop for long, though, no matter how scared she was of slipping over that edge. After forcing herself to slow her breathing, to stop gulping down air, she started moving again, keeping the bridge in her line of sight.

The distance seemed to grow like in a bad dream, and every step she took got her no closer to her destination. If anything, it felt like she was getting farther away. Her legs were starting to go numb with walking, and she'd have to rest soon. Soon, but not yet. She pressed on, one foot in front of the other, her mind blank of anything other than the need to make it to that bridge.

Just when she thought she was going to collapse, space seemed to snap back like a rubber band, and the bridge was right there, a little platform around the end, giving her enough space to swing her backpack off her back and pull out a water bottle. She took small, slow sips, until it was a quarter gone, then put it back even though she wanted to drain the whole thing. She could stop again after she crossed the bridge, she promised herself, and drink another quarter. Just to keep her going.

She looked up, went to step on the bridge, and a voice stopped her. "Not so fast, missy. You need to pay the toll if you're to cross."

A woman, tall and slim and glowing with an inner peace, stood next to her. She had raven black hair spilling down her back and her dark eyes were full of mischief. Chloe considered making a break for it, but some animal part of her brain told her that this woman would be able to catch her with no trouble. Her heart sank as she realized that if she wanted to get past, she was either going to have to pay with money she didn't have or incapacitate the woman.

Her hands inched toward the blades at her waist, but not slowly enough, because the woman looked at them and laughed. "Those aren't going to work. Only I can open the bridge to you. Go, try."

With a dubious look, Chloe turned back to the bridge and started forward. At first, it was easy, but the further away she got, the more it seemed like she was moving through sludge, until she couldn't push her way forward anymore. Her heart sank further, falling to the pit of her stomach where it sat like a lead weight, making her feel vaguely nauseated. She returned to the end of the bridge.

"I don't have any money," she rasped, and thought of Lucifer, of his way of refusing money in exchange for favors, and said, "I want to make a deal."

The woman looked amused. "There's no need for that; I'm willing to make a trade if you have no money. Say, fifty years of your life and I’ll let you cross."

"No." The word was out before Chloe had fully thought through the office. But fifty years may well be the rest of her life, and she couldn't risk that.

"I can only offer you so many things," the woman warned her. "Are you sure you want to reject that one?"

"Yes," Chloe said. Fifty years was too many. Call her selfish, but she wanted to spend as much time on Earth as she could.

"Hm," the woman said, circling her. It took all of Chloe's willpower to stay still, to not turn and keep her in her sight. "What about your left hand? Will you trade your left hand to me for passage across the chasm?"

Chloe considered it. She was under no illusions that as she continued, her luck wasn't going to hold. She had only met one demon she had to fight so far but was sure there would be more. She couldn't afford to lose a hand. "No," she said slowly, "I can't do that."

The woman looked thoughtful. "Think carefully about that one," she said. "I can only offer one more."

"And I can't choose between the three once you've offered them?" Chloe asked, hoping against hope that it would be like a secret Santa exchange.

"No," the woman looked almost regretful as she said, "you can't."

Fifty years of her life was worse than losing a hand. Could she assume that the third option would be even less bad? Two points didn't make a pattern, but could she really afford to lose her hand? Could she fight her way through a demon horde with only a single knife to protect her?

She closed her eyes, and said, "No, not my hand."

When she opened her eyes again, the woman was nodding. "My last offer: your most precious memory."

"What," Chloe said.

The woman met her gaze calmly, almost serenely. "Your most precious memory," she repeated, and added, with a sly look, "You can always turn around and go home.

No, she couldn't. She wasn't sure the door would reappear for her, or that the woman from the last cavern would take her back across the river, or that she could even squeeze her way in reverse through the tunnel. She couldn't leave Lucifer to whatever fate awaited him down here.

"Do I get to choose?" she asked.

The woman shook her head. "It will be the memory you treasure the most, whether you realize it or not."

She didn't like that, didn't like that she might not even know what memory was gone, didn't like that she couldn't be sure which memory it would be. What if it was something to do with her dad? What if it was something involving _Trixie_? She closed her eyes again, fear washing through her.

"Okay," she said, not opening her eyes. "Do it."

"Done," the woman said almost immediately, and Chloe's eyes popped open as she immediately started running through everything she remembered about her dad. "Oh, that's a sweet one," the woman said, licking her lips, but when she met Chloe's gaze, her eyes were filled with sorrow. "I'm sorry."

"What," Chloe said, her throat dry in a completely different way than it had been before. "What was it?"

"I'm sorry," the woman repeated. "I can't tell you."

Chloe nodded, feeling a numbness creep over her. An uncomfortable unease settled over her. She could feel that she was missing something, that a little piece of herself had been stolen away. And she'd probably never know what it was unless the person it involved brought it up.

"Go now," the woman said. "I'm sure my sister is waiting for you on the other side."

"What will she want from me?" Chloe asked, even knowing she wasn't going to get an answer.

"I can't tell you that," the woman said, and her gaze grew distant before snapping back to the present. "All I can say is that you will be... a force to be reckoned with."

"Gee, thanks," Chloe said. That wasn't helpful. That didn't tell her if she survived or if she just went down taking lots of demons with her. She turned to the bridge and started walking. It wasn't until she was out of sight of either side of the chasm that she realized she couldn't remember Trixie being born anymore.

She fell to her knees and wept.


	4. Wherever He Is, Is Where I'll Go

Sometime later, after she had exhausted her ability to cry, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled on. She looked over the edge of the stone bridge once, and that was a mistake. With her stomach swooping from vertigo, she moved to the center and kept there for the rest of the journey across.

When she came to the other side, there was another person waiting for her, this time a teenager, looking spookily like how she imagined Trixie would look in a few years.

"Hey," she said, nodding to Chloe.

Before responding, Chloe pulled the open water bottle from the mesh pocket on the side of her backpack and took a swig, just enough to wet her throat so she could talk. "So, what are you going to take from me?" she asked bitterly.

"Nah," the girl said. "Nothing important, just your life, if you lose." She held up a battered Monopoly box.

"Are you kidding me," Chloe said.

"What?" the girl asked. "It's a good game, shows your character." She motioned to the table, just big enough for the monopoly board and two glasses of water. "Have a seat."

Chloe looked at the glass longingly as she sat and took another tiny sip of her water. It did little to quench her thirst. They started the game, and it quickly became apparent that their luck was not evenly matched. Within a few rolls of the dice, Chloe was in jail and the girl was well on her way to owning every spot on the board.

"Are you cheating?" she asked the girl, eyeing the stack of money in front of her warily. It was awful large for how long they'd been playing.

"Of course not," the girl said. "That wouldn't be fair, would it?"

"Mm," Chloe said. Still, she kept an eye on the girl's hands, and shook up the dice good when she got them, hoping to feel if they were weighted or not, knowing it was pointless even as she did it.

The game proceeded, and before long the girl had Park Place, but Chloe had the railroads and hotels on all her properties on the rest of the board. She still had less money than the girl did, but things were seeming less bleak. Right up until she ended up in jail three turns in a row. Fucking stacked deck and weighted dice.

"Winning doesn't count if you're cheating," she said, rolling the dice and ending up on Broadway. Score.

It took another few rounds, but she had built up enough hotels around the board—and on Broadway—that the girl's money was steadily shrinking faster than Chloe's was shrinking.

"Huh," the girl said as she handed over the last of it and conceded defeat.

"What, never lost before?" Chloe asked, breathing a sigh of relief and standing up. She almost reached for the glass of water before remembering and instead drinking the last of the water bottle. It was tempting to just throw the plastic bottle into the chasm, but she was a responsible person and put it back in her backpack.

"No, of course not, it's just a game of luck is a weird choice."

"Then why'd you choose it?" She slung the backpack back on her back and stretched a little, her back cramped from slumping in the chair and her legs burning with over-exertion.

The girl looked surprised. "I didn't, you did."

Chloe looked back at her in surprise. "No, I didn't."

"Or, I should say, the game chooses you," the girl said with a grimace. "Go, Hell is on the other side of that door." She jerked a thumb at the door that had materialized in the wall behind her.

It didn't make any sense, but Chloe brushed off the questions about how a game could choose anything, and said, "Aren't I already in Hell?"

The girl laughed. "No, not really. This is just the entryway. Now go before I change my mind and challenge you to a more fitting game."

Chloe quickly edged her way around the girl and stepped through the door.

It was twilight in the new cavern, even without a sun. For a long moment she thought it was snowing, but as the falling flakes piled in the hand she held out, she realized it was ash. It fell at a constant rate as she walked down the road, but never seemed to accumulate on the ground, like once it landed it was reabsorbed into the landscape.

She snorted a dry laugh at how much it was like that one video game, and immediately choked on the taste of ash and smell of sulfur in the air. It was disgusting, and she gagged, spitting out what little spit she had.

Maze had told her that the high security section of Hell would be two lefts and a right from the entrance, and it was usually guarded by four demons. But that was before Beelzebub had taken over, and who knew what it would be guarded by now.

There was an eerie silence in the air; she had expected screams of the damned or something, not this oppressive silence. It was like the ash had muted everything; even her footsteps sounded dull and muffled. It had her ears straining to hear the slightest noise, to hear if someone was sneaking up on her.

The corridor she walked down was suspiciously empty. Her sense of unease grew the farther she went without seeing anyone or hearing anything. Then again, Lucifer had never told her how many demons were in Hell. Maybe it was always like this: empty and silent with a hollowness that seemed to reflect the lack of everything back at her.

The two lefts came up quickly, but it took time walking along the alleyway she found herself in before she finally reached the right. She peered around the corner, hands on her knives, to see a locked door at the very end. There was no one guarding it and no one that she could see in either direction down the alley.

This was almost definitely a trap.

Still, what could she do? It didn't look like there was another way to get to the door, and she didn't know the layout of Hell well enough—obviously—to know if there was a second entrance. It hadn't even occurred to her to ask Maze about alternate routes, she had been so impatient to leave.

There was nothing she could do but walk into the trap and hope she could fight her way out. She slowly moved down the hall on high alert, watching for anything that was ready to spring on her. The back of her neck was prickling with danger, but whenever she looked back, there was nothing following her and nowhere for someone to hide.

In spite of the massive lock on the door—a lock she was prepared to pick if she had to—it opened silently at her touch. There wasn't even a handle she needed to push; she could just walk through. So, she did, and began searching for Lucifer's cell. As she walked down the hall, she peered into the windows of the cells on both sides, hoping to see him. Instead there were a lot of strangers and one face she vaguely recognized but couldn't place. She hoped it wasn't someone she knew.

Each person was sitting somewhere in their cell, staring off into nothingness, catatonic. Part of her thought that was good, less chance that someone would alert guards and sound the alarm. The rest of her was intensely creeped out and kept urging her to hurry, to find Lucifer and get out of there as quickly as possible. The ash she was breathing in made her want to cough constantly, but she held it in as best she could, not wanting to alert anyone that she'd fallen into their trap. Not yet.

At the very end of the cell block was a door with three different locks and when she peeked in, there was Lucifer, sitting against the far wall, staring into nothing. She could see a long chain covered in glyphs that made her eyes hurt running from his ankle to somewhere out of sight, and something about it set her blood boiling.

"Lucifer," she hissed on the off chance he would hear her and respond. Nothing.

So, she fumbled her lockpicks out of her pocket, and began to try to silently get the highest lock open. By the time she hit the bottom one, she was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, they were going to be able to get out of here.

"I knew you'd come for him."

Chloe slowly turned, dropping the lockpicks in favor of pulling out Maze's knives. A burly demon stood in the hall, blocking it, a grin on his face that had her shrinking back against the door. She lurched forward with a yelp when her skin came in contact with one of the locks. They had soaked up the heat that surrounded them until she had to be careful not to touch them or risk burning more fingers.

The demon sneered at her, "No need for violence. I'm here to offer you a deal."

She opened her mouth to reply, but started to cough instead, spitting out mucous stained black with ash. "Who are you and what kind of deal?" she asked when she tried again.

He rubbed at his white boy beard, looking her up and down before answering. "I am the mighty Beelzebub. The one Lucifer made the mistake of leaving behind."

Chloe looked him over before saying, dismissively and against her better judgment, "I doubt it was a mistake."

He growled at her, showing the sharp fangs in his mouth. She found herself pressing back against the door again, heedless of the burn of metal on her arm until he stopped.

"Do you want the deal or not?"

"You still haven't told me what it is," she said, cursing internally as her voice wobbled. She didn't think she could win if he decided to attack her, but she couldn't stop her mouth from getting her in trouble.

"If," he said, a tiny, cruel smile on his face, "you can break him out of his guilt, you can leave together, provided you make sure he never comes back. Hell is mine now, and he won't like the consequences if he returns."

"Why?" Chloe asked, narrowing her eyes. He had her cornered and could probably easily take her down. He had gone through the trouble of kidnapping Lucifer and locking him up. Why would he be willing to let him go now?

He sneered at her again before spreading his arms and saying, "I am a magnanimous ruler. Are you going to take the deal or not?"

"Of course I'm taking it," she snapped. "I'm not going to turn back now." She couldn't fight him, she knew that. And it looked like the only way out was through him, so that wasn't an option. It left her with the one choice, the only choice she could make anyway: save Lucifer.

"Excellent," he said and took a step forward, putting a finger on her forehead before she could duck and pushing. With a scream, she felt herself falling backward, through the door and onto the hot stone floor.

* * *

She didn't land. Instead, she found herself on her feet in a familiar, shot up room, bullet holes peppering the wall and a broken window up high. It was the room where he had protected her from being shredded by bullets and finally (accidentally) revealed his true face. And there he was, standing in the center of the room, staring at his hands like he'd never seen them before.

"Lucifer!" she called, moving quickly to his side. But he didn't look up, and when she put a hand on his shoulder, he didn't react. Not even when she shook him, repeating his name.

"It's all true." Her own voice came from behind her and she whirled around to see her double standing there, staring at him in horror. A soft light seemed to surround her, barely visible, and she was certainly more beautiful than when she looked in the mirror in the mornings. Was this how he saw her all the time? Less exhausted than she felt, less like a single mom trying to make ends meet on a cop salary and more like-

She shook her head a little, shaking the thought out. It didn't matter how he saw her, what mattered was that her double's face was slowly morphing from horror to anger, which she didn't remember happening. She had been horrified, true, and she had walked away, yes, but she hadn't been angry. At most she was hurt, at the time, that he hadn't shown her before. That he didn't trust her with that.

Of course, with the way she walked away, maybe he had been right not to trust her. She tried not to think about it, about the look on his face as she turned away. About the look on his face when she showed up at Lux days later, like he'd been certain he would never see her again and it was a precious gift that she had come to see him. If she thought about it too much, the guilt would eat her alive.

"You could have shown me," her double accused, stepping forward.

That... wasn't how it had gone. She had walked away from him. Just left him there with a mess of blood and feathers and dead bodies, while she stepped outside to wait for backup and try to come to terms with what she had just seen and all its horrifying implications. He had been gone when the other officers arrived.

"Lucifer," she said, shaking him again. A few feathers floated to the ground, but he still didn't acknowledge her. Instead, he looked up with a look of anguish on his face.

Her double stepped forward again, hissing, "You could have shown me, and you didn't. I thought you never lied."

He reeled back like she'd slapped him. "I- I tried, but-"

"You should have tried harder." Her double was slowly advancing on him as he took step after step backwards, crying out when he stumbled over a body and his wings hit the wall.

Chloe tried to get between them, but her double just brushed past her until she was up in Lucifer's face. "I never want to see you again and it's all. Your. Fault."

Then her double turned and walked away. Lucifer folded to his knees, his scarred face crumpling. "Chloe," he whispered, but her double either didn't hear or didn't care.

"Lucifer," Chloe said, kneeling in front of him. "Look at me. That's not what happened. I get why you didn't show me. It's not your fault."

He looked right through her though, like she wasn't even there. Then he was standing, a broken noise escaping him that she wasn't sure if was because of his mangled wings or because of, well, her. He took a step and launched into the air, only faltering slightly before he swooped through the broken window.

Fuck.

She turned to the door, intending to go after him, but the door wasn't there anymore because she was standing in the empty penthouse at Lux, all the furniture covered in drop cloths. It caused something uneasy to twist in her stomach. The elevator doors opened behind her, and she turned to see herself walking in and stopping in shock, looking around.

Devastation spread across her double's face. Seeing her own emotions written there so obviously was uncomfortable to watch. She hoped that wasn't what she looked like in real life, that this was all Lucifer's guilty imagination.

A small scuffing noise had her turning to see Lucifer in the shadows in the corner of the room, barely hidden. He definitely hadn't been there when this happened the first time. He took half a step backward, then the world tilted, and they were back watching her walk away from him and his bloody wings.

She turned to try to get his attention again and she was standing on a beach, watching herself kiss him for the first time, and the look of wonder on his face when she pulled away.

"I need to show you something," he said, stepping back. "I have been... selfish, Detective. I wanted to hold on to what we have as long as possible, and I knew-" he closed his eyes "-I knew that this would be the end."

"What are you talking about?" her double asked. More things that didn't happen. Her double went to raise a hand to his cheek, but he stepped back, out of her reach.

"Do you remember when you shot me?" he asked, closing his eyes.

"I'm not shooting you again," her double said, frowning.

He opened his eyes, fire burning in them, and her double gasped and stepped backwards, moving away from him.

"How long?" her double asked. "How long could you have shown me?"

He swallowed, shaking his head a little. "Any time," he said, the fire fading from his eyes. "I'm sorry."

"So, telling me that you never lied, that was a lie?" Her double looked furious, and then they were back, watching her walk away in a room full of Cain's men, Lucifer crumpled on the floor.

They were in Lux, at her house, on the beach again, and every time she walked away. It was painful to watch, the way his face crumpled every time she turned away, the way he didn't look surprised. That was what killed her the most, that he knew what was coming once he proved to her that he was the Devil, every time.

"It's not real," she said from her spot next to him. "You need to wake up, Lucifer, it's _not real_."

Except it was, kind of. She had walked away. She had walked away from him, just leaving him there, in the mess of blood and bodies, and he had thought she wasn't coming back.

"God damn it, Lucifer, it's not real. I came back."

"There's no need to bring Dad into this, Detective," Lucifer said, and froze. He slowly turned to look at her, and then they were on the floor of his cell in Hell, the ash in the air making her cough before she could say anything.

"What-" he started to cough too, a deep, wracking cough. She wondered if being near him here, in Hell, still made him mortal, or if it was an effect of being neither Lord of Hell nor a demon. As the coughs quieted, panic filled his eyes. "What- What happened? What are you doing here? Why are you here? You shouldn't be _here_."

"Lucifer," she said, trying to catch his attention, but he was too deep in panic mode.

"I can't protect you here, not anymore," he said, looking around wildly. "How did you-" he swallowed. "We need to get you out of here."

"Lucifer," she said, grabbing his face with both her hands and forcing him to look at her. "I'm here to rescue you, you idiot. Calm down."

"You're not... dead?" he asked, eyes roving over her face.

"No," she said, and bent forward to press a gentle kiss against his lips. "And we're going to get out of here. Okay?"

He nodded, watching her with a look in his eyes that was far too close to the look he had when she had walked away all those times. "I hope you have a plan, Detective," he said, eyes skittering between her face and the door, like he couldn't stop looking at her, yet it was painful to look at.

"Hey," she said, waiting for him to look at her again. "I'm not going anywhere without you, got it? I'm not leaving again."

"I should hope not," he said, but there was something about his tone that said he wasn't as confident as he tried to project. She could deal with that later, though. For now, they needed to get out of there.

The door was unlocked, which was a surprise, and the chain had disappeared from around Lucifer's ankle. She had half expected to be trapped in there with him, Beelzebub having gone back on his word

But, no, he was standing outside, leaning against the wall like he had all the time in the world to wait for them. She supposed that he did. A momentary flash of surprise went across his face when he saw them, which had her narrowing her eyes at him. If he tried to go back on their deal, well. She had demon knives and backup now.

"So, you managed to break the cycle," he said, sounding bored. "I suppose I can explain the terms of the deal."

"What _terms_?" she said, glancing back at Lucifer. "The terms were, I get him out, you let us leave."

"Surely, you didn't think it would be that easy?" he asked with a smirk. She waited for Lucifer to step in, to say something, anything, but when she glanced back to him, he was just watching Beelzebub with wary eyes. "Oh, don't worry about him. This was a deal between you and I."

Chloe bit her lip and considered arguing. But, he was the new Lord of Hell, and if he changed his mind, there was no way they were getting out. So, she nodded slightly, and said, "What are the terms?"

"They're simple enough," Beelzebub said. "You-" he pointed at her "-walk out and don't look back. You-" he pointed to Lucifer, a grin on his face that had her cop sense pinging "-follow behind. If she looks back, you stay."

It sounded easy enough, especially given once she got past the river, it wasn't like she would be able to look back anyway. But Lucifer had narrowed his eyes like he knew the game Beelzebub was playing and didn't like it. She hated not having all the information, and this situation was just full of little things she just wasn't getting.

"That's it," she said. "I just. Walk out. No more tests, no more demons."

Beelzebub nodded, looking delighted in a way that had her suddenly and completely regretting making any deal with him. "That's it. Shouldn't be too hard."

She glanced to Lucifer again, waiting until he shifted his gaze from Beelzebub to her, and raised her eyebrows in silent question. After a moment of intense staring—she could swear he was trying to memorize her face—he nodded.

"They'll try to tr-" he started to say, but Beelzebub clucked his tongue at him and Lucifer's mouth snapped shut.

"Tsk tsk tsk, no spoiling the fun. And you know what I'll do if you try to spoil my fun."

Lucifer glanced to her and away so fast she almost missed it. It wasn't hard to guess that Beelzebub was threatening her to ensure Lucifer's cooperation, and she could feel her fists clenching without conscious thought. She forced them to unclench before Beelzebub noticed.

"Why?" she asked, not sure what exactly she was questioning, but needing to get information somehow.

"It's an act of faith, see," Beelzebub said, and Lucifer made an enraged noise of protest, but a look from Beelzebub shut him up. "You have to put your faith in me-" he sounded absolutely gleeful about it, and it had her stomach churning "-that I won't change the terms of the deal and steal him back from you."

"Okay," Chloe said. "So, are you going to change the terms?"

Beelzebub pasted an offended mask over his features, but she could see the hard expression below, anger and hatred creating a toxic mix. "Of course not," he said.

She nodded and turned to Lucifer, refusing to treat this like the last time she was going to see him. What choice did she have, beyond believing Beelzebub wouldn't fuck with her? There was nothing she could do if he changed his mind; it would be out of her hands as soon as they started walking.

Lucifer was watching her, a bleakness in his gaze that she didn't like. There was something she was missing, but she couldn't put her finger on what. Trusting that, if she was about to make a big mistake he would tell her, she turned back to Beelzebub.

"Okay," she said. "All I have to do is not look back." She could do this, despite what the cruel smirk on his face was saying.

As she turned and started walking down the corridor, she suddenly regretted not taking the extra time to make sure Lucifer was really okay, that it was really him and this wasn't some new torture his mind had cooked up. But it was so hot, and her throat was so dry, and she was _hungry_, she realized. Who knew when the last time Lucifer had eaten or had something to drink; she should have given him some of her water bottles and snacks.

She closed her eyes for a moment. She could do this. Just don't look back. It should have sounded easy, like something she could do in her sleep, but not look at Lucifer? Not have her gaze drawn to him when he was near? It was almost unthinkable.

Still, she squared her shoulders and set out through the ash.


	5. As Long As We Stay With Each Other

The left and two rights it took to get back out of Hell went without further incident. She didn't see any more demons, although whispers seemed to follow her footsteps. She couldn't make out what they were saying, and she thought that maybe it was just the sound of the river, echoing through the caverns.

She could hear footsteps behind her as they walked, a reassuring sound that let her know Lucifer wasn't too far back. If she didn't need to save her breath for the long walk back, if it were less dry and she could talk without sounding like sandpaper was in her throat, she would have asked him how he was, kept up a conversation that would let her know that he was there. Instead, she had to focus on his footsteps and keep moving forward.

The girl who looked too much like Trixie was still sitting at the table, idly constructing a tower of Monopoly pieces. It wobbled and fell with a clatter when she looked up and met Chloe's gaze.

"Hey," she said. "You made it!"

Chloe nodded, a small smile spreading across her face. "Yeah," she said, swallowing around a lump in her throat. "We did."

The footsteps had stopped and there was dead silence behind her. She wanted to look, to make sure Lucifer was still there, but she didn't. Instead, she slipped her backpack off her shoulders and took out two of the waters. She took a swig from one, wetting her throat just enough that she could talk without wanting to cry.

"If I leave this here..." she started, drifting off when the girl shook her head slowly as the whispers grew louder. It wasn't the river.

"Once it leaves your hands, it becomes a piece of here," the girl said. "And if you eat or drink anything from here..."

"Yeah," Chloe said, rubbing a hand across her brow, and then rubbing it on her pants to get the sweat off. "I know. Please tell me I don't need to play another game with you."

"Nah," the girl said. "You're free to continue."

Chloe nodded, putting the bottles of water back and slinging her backpack over her shoulder again. She started her trek up the arch of the bridge. It took a few feet for her to realize the sound of footsteps hadn't started up again. She stopped, grabbing the railing and focusing on the next few steps.

"Hey," she said, closing her eyes. "You still there?"

There was no answer.

The instinct to turn and look was strong, but she clenched her jaw and reminded herself that if she failed this soon, he would never let her live it down. If she ever saw him again.

"Is he still there?" she called back to the girl.

"I'm sorry," the girl said, and Chloe's heart plummeted. "I can't tell you that."

"Okay," Chloe said, relief flooding through her. "Okay."

She started walking again, listening hard for the sound of footsteps behind her over the sound of whispering. The words were starting to get more distinct, and she almost thought she could pick out muttered phrases. Almost.

She was ten steps onto the bridge, her shoulder aching and her legs hurting with every step, when they solidified into quiet voices.

_does she know he's not following?_

_poor girl_

Her steps faltered. They were lying. They had to be. She couldn't hear him behind her, true, but that didn't mean he wasn't there. Hell was full of illusions, she was certain, and it wasn't a stretch to believe they would be masking his steps to tempt her into turning.

She resolutely started forward again, not looking back.

The whispers continued, slowly growing louder the farther she was across the bridge, becoming harder and harder to ignore, along with the ache in her wrenched shoulder, the pain of the cuts and scrapes from squeezing through the last of the tunnel. Adrenaline had been fueling her on the way down. She wasn't sure what was going to fuel her on the way up.

Stubbornness, just like her dad had said.

_in love with the lord of hell_

_can't rescue someone who doesn't want to escape_

Now, there was a thought that hadn't occurred to her, and she felt doubt start to fill her again, which she tried to reason against. Lucifer had been a captive; he wasn't there of his own free will and coming to get him was the right thing to do. She couldn't have left him there in his misery. He wasn't there by choice.

_who could keep him in chains in his own kingdom?_

_foolish girl_

_silly girl_

She gritted her teeth and forced herself to keep walking, to not look behind. He would have told her, if he wasn't a prisoner. He would have told her if he wanted to stay.

Most importantly, he wouldn't have looked so panicked at the implication that she had died and ended up in Hell if he didn't love her.

The bridge seemed endless, time and space stretching as she walked on and on and on. The adrenaline rush of making it down to Hell, of rescuing Lucifer and facing down a demon had seeped out of her bones, leaving her feeling wrung out and shaky. She needed to rest, but she couldn't. She had to keep moving, had to force herself to put one foot in front of the other.

A warm trickle of something ran down her leg, thicker than the sweat that had been streaming from her body for hours now. She looked down to see that one of the cuts in her leg had opened and was sluggishly bleeding dark blood. She stared for a moment, stopped in the middle of the bridge. Had walking for so long or kneeling on the stone floor of Hell opened it up?

She put a hand to her arm, pressing against the cut there until the pain brought her brain back online. It wasn't bleeding, and her leg didn't matter, as long as she kept moving forward. One foot in front of the other.

The voices abruptly went silent, for which she was grateful. She didn't know how long she had walked, staring straight ahead, her neck growing stiff with the lack of movement. When her hand brushed something warm and hard, she jerked away, stumbling against the railing on the other side (but not looking back, never looking back). She looked down into the blackness, the bottom of the chasm far out of sight, and saw a myriad of points of light.

No, not points of light, eyes. A sea of eyes looking back at her.

She shook her head, hoping it was a mirage brought on by dehydration, but no. The eyes stayed, and a rush of whispers swallowed her, spiraling around and up in a legion of voices.

_he's not there_

_not there_

_the master lied_

_he was never there not there never there never there never there_

"Stop!" she screamed into the void, closing her eyes and clapping her hands over her ears, but the whispers were in her head, echoing around and around in a volley of denial.

She grabbed the railing with one hand, bracing herself on it as her shaky legs threatened to give out. It was a trick. She knew it was a trick, and she wasn't going to look back, but oh, how she wanted to. It was almost a compulsion, the need to turn and see if Lucifer was really there or if she had to go back and fight for him.

And she would, if it came to that. If she reached the end of the tunnel and he wasn't right behind her. She would take him by force if she had to, because she _knew_ him. It didn't matter what the voices were saying; he wouldn't have gone through so much trouble to stay on Earth if he was going to run back to Hell the moment things got too heavy between them.

She would never regret telling him that she loved him, never.

The voices had quieted as she stood there, eyes trained forward and one hand bracing herself up. Her legs stopped shaking as much, and she was able to push herself off and start walking again, eyes on the emptiness in front of her.

Time dilated as she walked. It felt like she had been walking for days, so thirsty she had gone beyond wanting a drink into some extra plane of existence where water didn't matter anymore. Her stomach had taken to growling constantly, but she didn't want to stop and get a snack bar out of her backpack. She tried not to think about how Lucifer must have felt behind her, with no water or food to sustain him as they walked.

He wasn't used to that sort of hardship.

She shook her head a little, stray hairs slipping out of her ponytail and sticking to her sweaty face. She scrubbed a hand across her forehead, but it did little to help. If it weren't so damn hot, she would dump a bottle of water over herself (and Lucifer would make a crack about wet T-shirt contests, and she would try to hide her smile but he would know, he always knew). But in this heat, not only were all the bottles already room temperature, they would evaporate too fast to provide enough cooling.

She jerked as space snapped and she could suddenly see the end of the bridge and the woman waiting for them. Her arms were crossed and the sound of her toe tapping echoed across the empty space. Chloe glanced over the side of the bridge on instinct—almost too close to looking back to Lucifer—and the eyes were gone.

Or closed. There could be a giant, many-eyed monster down there, lying in wait. Or sleeping, until the time came for it to rise and smash down the bridge with them on it.

She shook the thoughts out of her head and walked the last few yards slightly faster than she had been stumbling along before, a renewed energy in her legs.

"You're not supposed to be going this way," the woman said as soon as Chloe's foot touched the platform. "You need to go back. This isn't a way out."

"I can't," Chloe said simply as she moved past, not willing to argue. The woman reached out to grab her arm as she went by but stopped short.

"You can't get out of here by going forward," the woman said, warning her. "You need to go back."

"I am going back," Chloe said calmly, as she stepped off the platform and onto the thin trail along the chasm edge. She gasped as the bleeding leg faltered a little, the muscle twitching and almost refusing to hold her. She stood still, waiting for the twitching to go away so she could walk again.

"How do you plan to get through the tunnel?" the woman asked. "He's bigger than you, you know."

And that was what gave her pause. Was he? He was certainly taller, but the tunnel had been tall throughout. If he had to walk sideways for the first mile, that wouldn't be so bad, and at least he would make it out. His shoulders might not fit going straight on, but surely if he inched along sideways...

"I'll figure it out when I get there," she finally said, and started moving again. The woman was silent.

"Chloe!"

She hadn't gone far before Lucifer's yell almost had her turning around. She froze, fighting the urge.

"Chloe, stop!"

What if he was hurt? What if he was back there and couldn't continue, and she just kept walking? She would never know unless she checked, and she couldn't check until she was out of the cave system. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. No, this was another trick. She just needed to keep moving.

One foot in front of the other, facing always forward.

Lucifer kept calling out to her, kept using her name to try to get her attention, and that was what kept her moving forward. Even now that they were dating, he so rarely used her actual name. She was always "Detective" to him, even when they were alone. The few times he did say it, it was like something precious was being given to her for free. He wouldn't be calling for her now by name, no. It was another trap. It had to be.

"Chloe, please," the voice behind her begged. The path along the chasm was too shallow for her to get far enough away from the wall to plug her ears, but oh how she wanted to. Hearing him begging behind her was almost too much.

She pushed herself faster, hurrying along the path and hoping her leg didn't give out at the wrong time and send her falling over the edge. There was movement in the corner of her vision, something flowing along in the chasm beside her. She didn't look.

Blood dripped off her fingers from where her arm had started bleeding again. She had scrapped it against the wall, ripping open the jagged cut once more.

"You're hurt," Lucifer's voice said. "Let me help."

She pushed herself into a run. After a couple steps, Lucifer screamed and the sound of rocks bouncing down the side of a cliff reached her as the sound died out. Her heart clenched in her chest, tight and painful, but she didn't look back.

When she got to the archway, she rounded the corner of it, almost bouncing off the edge. The roar of the river filled her ears, drowning out Lucifer's voice, and she bent over, wheezing with the exertion.

When she slipped her backpack off, she almost cried out in pain as she moved her stiff shoulder. She wasn't sure what she had done to it, but it was going to need a doctor visit if they got back. When they got back.

The old woman stood on the shore, waiting, like the two before her had been. Her boat bobbed violently in the rush of the river, almost submerging at one point only to be thrown into the air at another. And she was going to have to ride that across again.

"I told you love is never enough," she said as Chloe came up to her.

Chloe scowled, the warm water splashing at her face and mixing with the sweat there. She was tired, and wanted to go home, and wanted to stop hearing Lucifer's voice begging her to stop. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Weren't you trying to bring someone home?" Lines of sorrow were etched into her face, but Chloe wasn't buying it. Even after the sound of Lucifer falling over the edge of the chasm, she wasn't buying it.

"You're not tricking me," she said.

She wasn't Ella. Faith wasn't something that came easily to her, but she could have faith that he followed behind her. She could believe that he was there even if she couldn't see him. Even if she couldn't check. It was the least she could do.

"Of course, dear," the woman said. Water was beading in her hair, dripping down the side of her face as she talked, and Chloe couldn't rip her eyes from it. She was so thirsty.

She was down to one water bottle, which she pulled out and drained half of. They were almost free; rationing had stopped mattering. The journey was shaping up to be much shorter than Maze had promised it would be.

"Will you take us across?" she finally asked.

The woman nodded. "This old thing has one more ride in her," she said, and drew the boat toward her.

She launched almost as soon as Chloe had sat down, and she cried out in protest. "I said us!"

"Don't you worry about it," the woman said, smiling.

Chloe slumped. They were so close to being out, so close. If Lucifer was still on the other bank of the river...

The river was swollen and wild and wide, and she found herself gripping the sides more fiercely than on her initial trip across. She thought she would puke more than once, and each time she glanced into the water, ready to throw up, she could swear there were faces in the waves.

Somehow, she brought her stomach under control, and managed to make it the entire way across. After getting out she scrubbed the water off her face with the bottom of her shirt, careful not to let any of it get in her mouth. She wasn't going to get Lucifer out just to be stuck here.

When, finally, she was in the room with the demon's body, the crevice in front of her looked smaller than she remembered, too small for her to possibly squeeze through.

"We just have to get through this," she said to the air, not looking back. There was no response from behind her, but she hadn't really expected one.

It took going in at an odd angle, her face firmly turned away from where Lucifer was behind her, but she managed to force herself into the crevice, and started to inch along, back to the surface.

The air got cooler as they went up, slowly but surely bringing relief from the oppressive heat of Hell. She had to stop several times to rest her legs, and she was dripping blood from several more scrapes as the passage grew wider, but soon she was able to turn her whole body forward and walk. The crick in her neck told her she'd be feeling the strain for days, but she didn't care. They were so close to being out.

The tunnel kept widening, until they could have easily walked side-by-side. She almost expected to feel his presence close behind her, for him to be eager to get out and be trying to silently hurry her along, but there was nothing. And she made it this far; she wasn't going to look back, not for anything.

The end of the tunnel was in sight when she heard a quiet, "Please don't leave me behind, Detective," from much farther down the tunnel. She almost turned around—she would go to her grave having nightmares where she did turn around, she just knew it—to reassure him that they were both getting out and stopped herself just in time. It was another trick. It had to be.

She clenched her teeth, grinding them together, and kept on walking.

Then she was out. Out into the cool dusk of what day, she had no idea. But they were out. They were _safe_ and she had succeeded, and they were going to be okay.

She turned around ready to grab him and kiss the living daylights out of him, a triumphant grin on her face, relief filling her as the sight of him almost to the cave mouth behind her.

Almost.

He looked stricken for just a moment when their eyes connected, before the look faded into a resigned acceptance as demons swarmed up around him, like he hadn't really expected anything different.

"No," she whispered as he disappeared under the pile of demons, and the pile of demons sunk into the ground. "No no no no _no_," she said, growing in volume until she was screaming. "We were _out_!"

But they hadn't been, had they? She had been out, and she just assumed...

As the last demon slid from sight, she found herself at the bottom of the cliff, staring at the rope she had anchored herself with when climbing it. She hadn't blinked or moved, just one second, she was staring at the cave entrance, and the next she was staring at the cliff face.

She let out a wordless scream of despair, bent over and pounding her fists on her legs. They had been so fucking close. If she had waited ten more seconds, he would have been out, and they would have been okay. They could have gone home and lived out the rest of her life in peace. And instead, he was back in Hell, and she was stuck in the hell of knowing she had almost saved him.

She screamed out her rage, sobbing until she had no more tears left. She couldn't let this stand. She _wouldn't_ let this stand. She would just... go back down and demand a second try. Or go sneak back in and escape with him. They always had been better together.

She would do anything, but she wouldn't leave him there. She wouldn't do that.

She straightened, wiping the tears off her cheeks and the blood off her hands. The rope dangled in front of her, and she grabbed it, wrapping it around her hand and giving it a few tugs. It held.

So, she started to climb, again. Her arms almost didn't want to hold her, and her legs were almost no help, but she was going to make it. She would get to the top of the damn cliff—she could see it; she was so close—and force her way back into Hell and-

The rope snapped, and she fell.


	6. Nobody's Innocent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've slept so it's totally tomorrow, right? I'm posting this super early since I actually have to go in to the office today. Tragic.
> 
> Only one more chapter left after this!! I hope y'all are enjoying.

Lucifer stood in front of her, wings—wings!—bloodied, eyes wild with fire, and face a horrible mess of raw flesh and scarred tissue. She couldn't stop staring.

"It's all true," she whispered to herself. "It's all true."

He looked confused for the briefest second, before looking down at his hands and taking a hurried step back, like he could distance himself from his own body.

"Detective," he said. "I- I can explain."

"You don't need to," she said, still staring, unable to make herself look away from the monster—no, he wasn't a monster, he was _Lucifer_—in front of her. "I understand completely."

She understood that he had been able to show her who he was all this time and had chosen not to do it. She understood that he didn't trust her. She understood that she was hurt—and a little afraid—and wanted him to be hurt too. She turned on her heel and started walking.

"Detective!" he called, anguish in his voice, but she didn't turn around.

She walked away.

* * *

A piece of crumpled paper rolled past her on the sand, blown by the wind. She stooped to pick it up, smoothing out the folds just enough to see "...wake up, sheeple..." before she threw it in the trash she was walking by.

Lucifer wanted to show her something, wanted to meet her on the beach and show her something important. He wouldn't tell her what, and she honestly didn't even have any guesses. What could possibly need her to come to a beach at twilight, after all the people had gone home.

He was standing facing the water, framed by the setting sun. She pulled out her phone and snapped a quick picture. The shutter noise had him turning around, and where she expected to see a smile on his face—when did he not smile when he saw her?—was only a sad frown.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You deserve to know and... I'm sorry that I took this long."

The pain in his voice made her want to hug him, to reassure him that he had nothing to be sorry about, even if it was a lie. To make sure he knew how much she cared about him and how that would never change.

In between one moment and the next, great white wings flared out behind him, framing him and casting shadow over the ground between them. They were backlit by the sun, beautiful and holy and made of lies. He was watching her like he knew what was going through her head, and it served him right when she turned back toward her car.

She walked away.

* * *

The battered sign advertising the "wake up sandwich" on the cafe by the station flapped in the breeze, banging against the window it was attached to. She could really use one of those today. Trixie had been up all night with nightmares, so Chloe had been up too.

"Detective!" Lucifer's bright voice was almost too much for the burgeoning exhaustion headache in her head. She waved at him irritably, hoping he got the message to tone it down.

"Morning," she grumbled into her coffee.

"And what's on the plate for today?" he asked, having _not_ gotten the message. "A little murder? Some mayhem? Someone I can punish?"

The light caught his eyes just right that, for a second, she could swear they were on fire. But as they moved toward the station together, the fire didn't fade, and she realized that his eyes danced with it.

She froze. It took him a couple steps, but he stopped too, turning back to her, asking, "What's wrong?"

"Your eyes," she managed to choke out around the knowledge that it was all true crashing down around her. "They're... Your eyes."

"Yes, they are my eyes," he said, head tilted a little in concern. He turned to peer into the side mirror of the car he was standing next to, and when he turned back to her, his eyes were back to normal, but his face was full of unbridled panic.

"I-" he said, taking a step toward her. She stepped backward, bringing up her hands. It was all true. It was all true, and she was probably going to hell for associating with the Devil—who looked like his heart was shattering to pieces the longer she stood silent—and it was too much for her to deal with all at once.

She walked away.

* * *

"You need to wake up, Detective, and accept that it's all true!" Lucifer yelled at her from across the kitchen island. He was furious at her denial, and maybe she shouldn't have brushed off his usual devil thing after such a late night at the precinct. "What will it take?"

"Something concrete!" she yelled back, raising her hands in disgust. "You can't just keep saying impossible things and expecting me to believe them. You can keep lying-"

"I've _never_ lied to you," he hissed, taking a step backward. "Is this proof enough for you?"

His face melted away to reveal the flesh underneath, ravaged by flame. A fire burned in his eyes. It was horrible to look upon, and she took a step back, away from him.

"Well?" he spat. "What have you to say now, Detective? Is it time to run the monster out of town?"

The elevator doors were open. She could stay here and have a conversation about that would end in them both screaming themselves hoarse at each other, or she could leave and collect her thoughts. She didn't miss the devastation across his face as she turned to go, but she couldn't stay, not when she wanted to strangle him.

She walked away.

* * *

She walked away and she walked away and she walked away.

* * *

Spray-painted across the front of the warehouse, in six-foot-tall letters, were the words "wake up now" and a big anarchist symbol. It was a slow day, so they'd been called in to investigate the graffiti. Lucifer looked like he was seconds away from declaring everything boring and going home.

Dark foot prints marred the ground, one full shoe and one half shoe, walking from where it looked like a paint can had spilled. She tracked them, knowing Lucifer would follow her, down across the parking lot and to the road, where they stopped with a little shuffle of paint.

"The perpetrators escaped, did they?" he asked. "Not much of a surprise, the paint was dried."

"Yeah, your detective skills are amazing," she said, looking back and smiling fondly at him. He grinned back at her for a second, before looking up at the street. Whatever he saw had the grin falling off his face, and he leaped forward as a curtain of white dropped down in front of her.

The sound of muffled gunshots found its way through the fluff, and with each report it jerked like something being hit. She was frozen in place while the wing—wing!—protecting her took the full force of the drive-by.

"What," she said, not straightening from her crouch even as Lucifer folded the wing back behind him, even as it disappeared into thin air. "What was that?"

"I believe it was a drive-by shooting," Lucifer said, eyes begging her to let it go. "Someone isn't happy with our investigation."

"You know that's not what I meant," she said and slowly, slowly straightened as she hard another car coming. She hustled him into the shadow of one of the buildings, still staring in shock. He had cut off his wings. That's what he had said. That he'd had them cut off, and here he was, with wings.

What other big things had he lied about?

"Detective..." he said. He looked _scared_, and he flinched when she raised her hand to brush through the space behind his back, like invisible wings would be so much better than wings that could disappear.

"You could have told me," she said. "Or just said you didn't want to tell me where the scars on your back came from. I would have- You didn't need to lie about it."

"I didn't," he protested, a full body flinch going through him when she met his eyes. They were begging her to believe him, but could she? She just shook her head and turned back toward the new crime scene, where officers had started to gather. She didn't look back over her shoulder.

She walked away.

* * *

It felt like a dream when the elevator doors opened, and the penthouse was empty. No furniture, not stocked bar, nothing. Just open space and the hollow sounds of an empty room.

She stepped through to the bedroom, to find Lucifer standing by the walk-in, shoulders slumped and screaming defeat. She wanted to go to him, to ask him what was wrong and find something to do to fix it, but she knew what was wrong. It was her. She was wrong.

"I guess it's time I wake up and admit this life was never mine," he said, staring into the middle distance.

"What life?" she asked, edging cautiously toward him. Something about him had her on edge, and not in the way she'd been for the past few days. She didn't think she was scared of him, not now. She was scared for him.

"This," he said, gesturing around to the empty room before looking up at her. "You."

"That's not-"

"It's alright," he said, holding her gaze. He was so _sad_, and she hated seeing him with this kicked dog look on his face. "I understand."

"I don't think you do," she said, edging closer to him like he was a feral animal she needed to catch. "I-"

"No," he said, and repeated, "It's alright. I get it, truly, I do." He smiled sadly at her. "I wouldn't want me here either."

"What are you _talking_ about," she said, edging closer still. She could almost reach out and touch him, if she thought he wouldn't bolt the second she did.

He shook his head instead of answering. "I'm sorry, Detective, for everything."

Then, with a jump and a flap of the wings that appeared, he dove out the open window. She gasped and ran to it, leaning over the edge, expecting to see him crumpled on the ground, but no. He was in the sky, soaring over the city like Icarus, getting smaller and smaller as he flew closer to the sun.

She didn't want to watch to see if he got too close and melted his wings, to see if he would plummet back to the earth. But walking away hadn't been the right thing to do before, and while it may have been the easy thing, it wasn't the right thing to do now.

She watched until he was nothing but a tiny speck up in the sky, and then—like a bad dream she needed to wake up from—the tiny speck began to fall.

* * *

Chloe sat up with a gasp, her heart pounding, ash coating her tongue. The cell she was in was gray and hot, the stone she sat on uncomfortably warm. Her backpack was gone, and it felt like her body was healed. How long had she been trapped in that nightmare?

She pushed herself to her feet, limbs aching with the feeling of being still for too long and stretched to bring life back into them. Her belt was heavy, and she could feel the weight of Maze's knives in their sheaths.

The last thing she remembered was falling; how had she ended up back here?

The door was locked, and she despaired for her lockpicks for a moment, looking around to see if there was something, anything she could use to pick the lock. At least she wasn't chained up, like Lucifer had been.

She blew a wisp of hair out of her face and it hit her. She had bobby pins. Within seconds, she had pulled two out of her hair and attacked the tumblers with them. It took a good ten minutes of fiddling and failing, but she was finally able to turn the lock and quietly open the door, checking to the left and finding no one.

To the right was a goat-hooved demon—Lucifer would have a lot to say about that when she teased him about it—leaning against the wall and looking bored. He wasn't watching the door, so she eased it open some more and slipped just far enough out that she could get him in a neck hold and drag him back into the cell.

"Where. Is Lucifer?" she asked, letting up on the chokehold only enough for him to be able to hiss, "Fuck you," at her. His goat hooves scrabbled against the ground, but they couldn't get enough purchase to for him to do anything.

"I'll ask you again," she said. "Where is Lucifer?"

"Go fuck yourself," he gasped, and she tightened her grip again, pressing the back of his head down so his neck had to be feeling the strain.

"Last chance," she said. He was getting heavy, and she couldn't keep holding him up forever. "Tell me where Lucifer is."

The demon chuckled. "I'd tell you to go to Hell, but you're alrea-" She broke his neck with a quick snap.

"Oops," she said, and stepped over the body. Hell was louder, this time, full of the noise of people going about their day. She could hear screams coming from somewhere nearby, and she was almost positive that one of them sounded like Lucifer.

If they were hurting him, she would burn the whole place to the ground.

She cautiously made her way down the hall, following the sound. Her door was the only one that had been guarded, and when the hall came to an end, she could see no one down the cross-corridor. After listening for the screaming again, she turned left. One of them was definitely Lucifer.

The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she pulled out Maze's blades just in time. A demon came around the corner of a hall that branched off the one she was on, small and round.

"Hey, what are you-" it started, but broke off into gurgles as the blades slit its throat. It bled out fast.

She couldn't stop wondering if she was going to end up back in Hell for killing demons. Did this go against the whole "thou shall not murder" thing? Or, since they were demons, did she get a free pass? She really hoped she got a free pass.

It took two more turns and doubling back once, but she didn't see any more demons as she followed the noise. Soon, the screams and sobbing of the damned were almost deafening, coming from all around her. She peered into one room, only to see a demon hard at work stripping the skin off what might have once been a man. Her stomach turned, and she almost threw up as she hurried on.

She peeked into several more doors but didn't find who she was looking for until the last one. It was slightly quieter at that end of the hall, and she could hear someone—Beelzebub—talking inside.

"Did you really think," he was saying as he fondled a knife, "that you could escape?" He traced the knife down Lucifer's bare back, blood welling at its tip, and grinned hungrily as Lucifer panted and made a pained noise.

He was tied on his stomach to a slab of rock, wings spread and wilted, boneless against the ground, covered in blood. She didn't want to think about why, and felt her gorge rise as Beelzebub pushed the knife in deeper and Lucifer screamed.

With a sudden burst of movement, he struggled against his bonds and she realized that, no, his wings weren't just too heavy for him to hold up anymore, they, too, were strapped down. He couldn't get them free—and light had sarted glowing on his bonds in the shape of letters she didn’t recognize—each movement drawing pained whimpers from him as he struggled.

Beelzebub just took a step back and laughed. "You know," he said, "she's not going to come for you again. She's probably forgotten all about you by now. How long has it been? How many months?"

It had been _months_? She couldn't help the quiet gasp that escaped her. They would think she was dead, she _was_ dead. And the only way to get back to her family, the only way to make her family whole again, was to get Lucifer out of here.

"Did you really think," Beelzebub was saying, "that a human could ever love a creature like you?"

Lucifer went limp, the fight gone out of him all at once. He shuddered, and she wanted to scream that it wasn't true, that of course she loved him, how could she not?

"Let's see what we can do about these wings. Regretting leaving me behind yet?" Lucifer howled as Beelzebub jammed the knife into his wing joint.

Before he could really start cutting, she slammed the door open.

Lucifer jerked at the noise and let out a hoarse, pained moan. He tried to turn his head, but she was behind him, in his blind spot. Beelzebub just looked up calmly, and said, "Oh, it's you."

"Yeah," Chloe said. "It's me."

Lucifer started to struggle again, one wing thrashing against its bonds, the other suspiciously still. She glanced between Beelzebub and the knife in Lucifer's back as Beelzebub stepped away.

"Oh, that's not coming out," he said with a laugh, leaning back against the wall with the air of calm confidence that came with knowing the little dog barking at your heels was no threat. "Are you here to make another deal?"

"No," she said shortly, gripping the knives tighter. "I'm here to kill you and take him home."

Lucifer made a noise of protest that she ignored, keeping her eyes on Beelzebub, who just looked amused.

"You, kill me?" he asked and chuckled, like it was a funny inside joke they shared. He straightened, and suddenly all the humor was gone from his expression as he stared her down. "Are you sure that's wise?"

"I'm sure it's not," she said, stepping forward and refusing to back down from his gaze. "But I'm going to do it anyway."

"Chloe," Lucifer gasped, and instinct was screaming at her to look at him, but she couldn't look away from Beelzebub, not even for a second. "Go, run. Leave me."

"Oh, right," Beelzebub said, drawing out the word. "Did I forget to tell you? She's dead. She died trying to get back to you."

The tortured moan that escaped from Lucifer was worse than anything she had heard yet, and the casual acknowledgment of her death had her shaking. Beelzebub laughed.

"I'm in a good mood today," he announced. "So, I'll give you a fighting chance. You can keep your little knives, and I'll fight with nothing but tooth and claw." He bared his razor-sharp teeth at her, clearly intending to intimidate.

If anything, it made her resolve stronger. She pushed all the fear to the back of her mind and narrowed her eyes at him. She could do this. She had Maze's knives and everything to live for, and the little voice in the back of her mind whispering that she was too smart to believe that mattered could stuff it.

Beelzebub started to circle her while Lucifer craned his neck, trying—and failing—to see them. She could see him flexing his muscles out of the corner of her eye, trying to loosen the restraints through sheer will. It wasn't something she could rely on working.

She gripped the knives in her hands tighter, her knuckles going white with tension. With surprising speed, Beelzebub moved in, taking a swipe at her. She barely avoided it and aimed a punch at his face. He dodged easily, and her shoulder screamed in protest at the move. Not so healed after all. She gritted her teeth against the pain and took a quick step back, out of his reach.

While she rolled her shoulder, he grinned, saying, "Not in top shape there, are we?"

She took the moment when he was distracted and darted in, scoring a shallow strike on his arm before he backhanded her into the wall.

"Chloe!" Lucifer yelled as she struggled to her feet, head spinning, and spit out blood. Beelzebub was almost on her, and she didn't have time to tell Lucifer she was okay.

She dodged the punch aimed for her head, just barely, and ran right into his other fist. The blow to her stomach knocked the wind out of her, and she fell. She could see Lucifer struggling out of the corner of her eye as she tried to catch her breath, and rolled toward him, narrowly avoiding the foot Beelzebub aimed at her head.

The knives in her hands felt like they wanted blood. She wasn't sure how she could tell that, but when he came at her again, she struck out with a wild flail and the knife sunk into his thigh. He stumbled, thrown off balance, and growled at her, low and menacing.

She couldn't spare the breath to make a crack about him not being in top shape anymore either, but she dearly wanted to. He jerked the knife out of his thigh and flung it across the room. Fuck.

She scrambled to her feet, and dove for the knife, but he grabbed the back of her shirt and dragged her toward him, claws raking down her back as she tried to twist away. Her shirt ripped, and he fell back, taking a chunk of flesh away with him.

The knife was just within reach when he grabbed her ankle. She rolled over, biting back a scream as her shoulder protested the movement, and kicked at him. She managed to connect with a crunch of breaking bone—his fingers, not her foot—and he howled in surprise and pain, cradling his hand to his chest.

"Not so tough now," she said as she spat out blood and stood, gripping both knives. "If I'd known all it would take was a little broken bone to stop you-"

She broke off as he threw himself at her, hissing, "I will _kill_ you."

Her arms moved on instinct it seemed, blades striking true and sinking into his chest. Before she could gut him, he rammed his shoulder into her bad one, sending her flying across the room to collapse against the wall.

She met Lucifer's eyes, and he looked terrified. She smiled, knowing the blood staining her teeth probably made her look deranged and not caring.

"Is that all you've got?" she asked, pushing herself to her feet and meeting his charge head on. Her arm didn't want to work, but she gritted her teeth through the pain and punched him in the face again, breaking his nose with a sickening crack.

He stumbled back as his nose gushed sticky black blood, mixing with the blood on his chest and dripping to the ground in hissing puddles. Great. She glanced down at her knives, prepared to see them degrading under the acidic blood, but they were completely clean.

She sent another prayer of thanks to Maze. Could demons even hear prayers? She hoped so.

His eyes were wild with rage, and he was sloppy as he swung at her and slowly drove her back until she was trapped against the slab Lucifer was strapped to. She ducked another rake of his claws that would have taken out her eye if it struck true.

"Come on," she taunted. "You can do better than that."

He rushed her, silent in his fury, and she thought he missed and overextended himself. She almost managed to get him with one of her blades but faltered when Lucifer screamed. In the millisecond it took her to reorient, Beelzebub had danced back, the knife from Lucifer's back in his hand.

"What happened to a fair fight," she said as they circled each other.

He snarled wordlessly and struck out. She raised her arm to block the blow, the knife in her hand clashing with his longer blade. He almost managed to get her, almost managed to grab her with his other hand, but she ducked out from under it. Her back was to the wall again, but this time he was close enough to attack.

He slashed back and forth with the blade as she slid across the wall, barely avoiding each slice. One caught the edge of her wrist, scoring a thing line across it that immediately welled with blood. She almost dropped her knife, and knew she was extremely lucky that he hadn't severed a tendon.

The exertion was getting to her, her breath coming in quick, sharp pants. She dodged another strike just barely and managed to drag the blade across his arm. Flecks of blood landed on her hand, burning, and she hurriedly wiped them off on her pants.

"You're going to wish you were dead," he growled, pushing into her space and nearly getting her in a headlock. She just barely managed to throw him over her shoulder.

"Buddy," she said between breaths as he crashed to the ground, "I already am dead."

He rose with a roar, but she was right there, blades going into his stomach and tearing upward. It wasn't enough to gut him, but it was close, and he faltered back a step, looking down.

She used the moment to her advantage, sweeping his leg out from under him so he crashed down on the ground again. Then she was on his back, grabbing his hair and pulling his head back, slitting his throat before she registered what she was doing.

He gurgled and stilled as she let go, his forehead landing on the ground with a crunch. She sat, straddling his back for a minute, breathing hard and head hanging down. Her hair was in her face.

She brought up a shaking hand to brush it back behind her ear and got caught, staring at the blood slowly oozing down to drip from her fingers. She had just killed three people—no, demons—and only one of them could be considered self-defense. No, two, if she added the demon she killed when first going down after Lucifer.

She dropped the knives, the clatter as they hit the ground dull in her ears. The sound of struggling and noises of pain from Lucifer had stopped, and the room was silent as a grave.

"Chloe?" Lucifer broke the silence, a tremor of fear running through his voice. Fear for her.

"Yeah," she said, exhausted. "I'm okay."

She pushed herself to her feet and wavered for a moment before catching her balance and moving toward him. The restraints didn't have buckles or knots or anything that could be undone to free Lucifer.

"How..." she asked.

It took him a moment to answer, and then he said, his voice strained, "The knife. Cut them with the knife."

She nodded, it not really registering that he couldn't see her, and trudged back over to gather Maze's knives and the one Beelzebub had tried to kill her with. When she looks up, there are demons gathered in the doorway, eyes wide and staring.

If she had to fight them all, she was going to die. Again. But she'd do it, for him.

She walked forward, a hard mask falling over her features. She would take as many of them down with her as she could.

But before she could get to them, they scattered, running down the hall in either direction. She shut the door behind them. There wasn't a lock, and there was nothing to drag up against it, but it made her feel like at least she had done something.

She started at the straps on his legs and worked her way up his body. He groaned in pain when she had to touch his wings to steady them, and his body tensed when she walked around to cut the restraint off the one Beelzebub had been in the process of cutting out.

And then he was free. She would have thought he would immediately jump up, needing to move after being tied down for who knew how long, but he was still.

"Lucifer?" she said, coming around and crouching in front of him. "Hey," she said softly, reaching out and running her clean-ish hand over his head and gently lifting urging him to lift it. He looked exhausted and his eyes were bright with unshed tears.

He pushed his head into her head briefly when she caressed his cheek, then froze and looked away, almost hunching in on himself. It took her a moment to realize why.

"It's okay," she said, reaching out again and running her fingertips over his burned face in a gesture of comfort and acceptance. "It's okay."

He groaned as he pushed himself up onto his elbows. His front was covered in bruises and she winced at the sight.

"You came back," he said wonderingly, watching her with wide eyes and starting to push himself to a sitting position. "For me. Even though I'm..."

"Of course I did," she said, ignoring the end of what he said, and started to help him to sit up., He cried out as he tried to move his wings, the most damaged one hanging limply from his back. "You would do the same for me."

He shook as she gently moved his wing, blood flowing down his back from the knife wound. She needed something to stop the bleeding, but there was nothing.

"Where can we go?" she asked, ducking her head so she could meet his eyes. "We need to get you patched up."

"I-" he raised his head and, as though seeing her for the first time, zeroed in on the blood covering her. "You're hurt."

"Yeah," she said, suddenly able to feel every injury and torn muscle. "I guess we should patch me up too."

"I'm sorry," he said, and she shook her head at him.

"Don't," she said shortly, and he cringed back. She cupped his cheek again and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead. "Where can we go?"

He wobbled as he pushed himself to his feet, and she quickly propped him up, letting him rest too much of his weight on her good shoulder. She was suddenly aware of how hot it was, how thirsty she was, and how much she _hurt_.

"My castle," he said when he was finally stabilized.

"You have a castle," she said, slowly moving them to the door.

He tried to shrug and froze before slowly relaxing his shoulders. “I am the king of Hell after all.”

His wings dragged on the floor and she winced at the noise. There had better not be any demons out there, ready to attack, because she didn't think either of them could do anything about it.

They stepped out of the room together, Lucifer leaving bloody footprints in his wake and she, dripping blood from her arm. Her head spun, and she faltered once they cleared the threshold. She must have had a concussion.

The hall was lined with demons of every shape and size. Some were too horrifying to look at directly and some looked human. Lucifer straightened as best he could, and they all seemed to shrink away from him.

The demons parted before them as they slowly walked down the hall, leaning more on each other at every step, until she was certain they were propping each other up like a card tower. One wrong move, one wrong breath, and they'd both tumble down.


	7. It's a Love Song

Chloe wasn't entirely sure how long it took to get to Lucifer's castle. She was pretty sure she had blacked out at one point, because one moment they were in a long hallway and the next they were slowly walking up the steps leading to a massive stone castle.

"Wow." she managed to muster

"That's all?" he asked, adding, "Just 'wow'?" but his heart clearly wasn't in it and she didn't respond.

Once at the door, he turned, and she turned with him. He surveyed the demons waiting in front of them, most of them looking uncomfortable and some of them whispering to each other. They looked like nothing more than a bunch of kids waiting to be scolded by their teacher.

"You all had _one job_," Lucifer yelled, straightening until he was barely leaning on her at all. "Keep Hell running in my absence."

The demons shuffled their feet, looking around at each other. She channeled Maze, standing there a step behind him, face impassive. She wanted nothing more than to behind that door where no one could see her, so she could collapse.

"But-" one of the demons started to say. Lucifer snarled, one wing – the least injured wing – bristling threateningly, and the demons all quailed, shrinking back from him.

"Anyone else?" he asked, taking a step forward. The demons collectively took a step back. "Good. Do not make me come back down there."

They scattered and, once the last one was out of sight, Lucifer turned.

"Could you have done that at any time?" she asked, narrowing her eyes. If this whole rescue had been for nothing, if this had just been some kind of kinky game of his...

"No," he said, opening the door and walking through. She followed. "Beelzebub was a... special situation."

He didn't seem to be willing to elaborate, so she let it go. As soon as the door was shut, they both stumbled to a stop, almost collapsing together.

"Just a few more steps, love," he said after a moment, nudging her toward a staircase off to the side. His wings barely fit through the archway.

They went up and up, her exhaustion—or was she going into shock?—only rivaled by how thirsty she was. She would kill for something to drink, anything. She didn't care if she was stuck here forever, she was dead anyway.

Lucifer stiffened next to her, and she realized she must have been saying that all out loud. "We'll fix it," he said fiercely. "I won't-"

"I know," she interrupted. "I know, just. Let's fix ourselves first."

Finally, the stairs ended. She collapsed into a chair in the room they stopped in. Lucifer still had his devil face, and when he noticed her looking at him, he half turned away and started across the room. The scraping sound his wings made as they dragged across the floor was almost worse than nails on a chalkboard. Now that they were alone, she realized he was making tiny noises of pain with every step.

"Hey," she said, pushing herself to her feet and only wobbling a little as she followed him. Her shoulder _hurt_ and one of her legs was almost definitely had bruises down to the bone from hitting the wall.

He paused briefly in rummaging through a cabinet then continued while saying, "Yes, Detective?" his voice full of forced innocence.

"What's wrong?" she asked, leaning gratefully against the counter off to his side and putting a hand on his arm. He flinched away from her touch and she swallowed down a sting of hurt.

"Nothing," he said, finally pulling down and armful of bandages. "I'm afraid there's no antiseptic, but at least we can stop the bleeding," he added, motioning to her arm with his head.

"Mmhm," she said, but dropped it for the moment, instead guiding him over—despite his protests that she needed looking after more than he did—to sit backwards in a chair so she could get to his wings.

"This is going to hurt," she warned him, plucking gauze out of his hand. He nodded and braced himself as she wadded it up in her good hand and pressed it to his back. He let out a hiss of pain, but he didn't jerk away from her, though she could feel his muscles trembling with the need to.

"Really,” he said as she tried to figure out how to bind the bandage on him with his wings in the way. "This is completely unnecessary. I'll be fine; it's just a scratch. If you'll just let me get a shirt, I can patch up your arm."

"Can you even move that wing anymore?" she asked. It gave a weak flutter, before his scarred shoulders slumped in defeat. "I know," she said, running a comforting hand down his side. He shuddered, and she jerked her hand back. He'd told her that the burns didn't hurt, but was that just up top? Did they feel different in Hell?

"It's alright," he said, shuddering again and, whimpering a little, pushed himself up and took a step away from her before she could protest. "Just unexpected."

He turned, a bright false smile on his face and refusing to entirely meet her gaze. His skin flickered for a moment, his glamour almost covering his body before it sputtered out.

Oh. She moved back into his space, reaching up to turn his face back toward her. "It's okay," she said. "I don't mind."

He leaned into her palm for a second, before shaking his head and stepping away. "I'm sorry."

"Don't," she said, about to reach for him with both arms before her shoulder reminded her that she wasn't going to be moving it fluidly any time soon.

"You're hurt," he said, pointing out the obvious as he rushed to her side. His fingers were gentle as they skimmed her wounds and felt her shoulder. He clenched his jaw, fire igniting in his eyes for a second before he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were red, but not burning with hellfire. "Here, let me-"

"I'm fine," she said, stepping back out of his grasp. Resignation and hurt flared in his eyes before he masked it with a smile.

"I think we both know that's not true," he said. But he didn't crowd back into her space, didn't reach for her. Instead he looked away, staying still as she circled around to his back again. He shuddered and tensed as she touched him, but she didn't jerk away this time, just stroked her thumb soothingly over his hot flesh until he relaxed.

She licked her dry, chapped lips and rested her forehead against his back, careful to avoid the knife wound in his wing joint and the other cuts going down his back. "What do we do now?" she asked.

"Now?" he said, turning, the drag of his wings on the stone floor hurting her ears. He raised his good wing and forced it to fold back out of existence, pain flashing across his face. "If you could just..."

She moved around him and helped maneuver his other wing into the right position, and then it, too, snapped out of existence, a strangled noise of pain coming from Lucifer. He turned and took her arm, gently prodding at the cuts on it. "I..."

"You don't know what to do with human wounds, do you?" she asked, a smile pushing through her exhaustion.

"No, I'm afraid I don't. My skills lay in... other areas." He looked regretful, and slowly let down her arm. At some point, it had stopped bleeding, and that, she supposed, was the best she could hope for unless she wanted to trust Lucifer to give her stitches. She loved him, but she did not love him that much.

"I'll be fine," she said gently, and took a couple wobbling steps toward the cabinets before rethinking it and aiming for one of the chairs. She collapsed onto it gracelessly, looking over as Lucifer leaned against the counter.

He closed his eyes for a moment. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay," she said. It didn't matter what he was apologizing for, at this point. "How are you going to get out of here," she asked instead, pointedly not thinking about how she had died and wouldn't be going anywhere. What was she going to do?

"We," he immediately corrected her, and cast a disgusted look backward. It took her a moment to realize he was looking at where his wings would be. "Well we certainly won't be flying out."

She nodded, running her tongue across her lips again. She really wished her backpack hadn't disappeared when she died.

Lucifer seemed to suddenly notice her problem, or suddenly remember she was human, or something, because he pushed himself off the counter and walked over to her, and, after a moment, offering her a hand. "I suppose we should find you something to drink, and maybe some food."

"Trying to trap me here?" she joked with a grin as she immediately took his hand and let him pull her to her feet.

"Yes, well," he said, leading her down the stairs, glancing to her and away quickly. "I would never try to curtail your free will," he said, and fell silent, even though she was pretty sure there was a "but" in there somewhere.

"You know you don't need to, right?" He glanced at her again and looked away. "Lucifer," she said, stopping halfway down the stairs and making him look at her. "As long as I have the option, I'm not going anywhere."

He nodded, without saying anything, and she sighed, letting him tug her into motion again. At the bottom of the stairs, they made it halfway across the room before Lucifer froze.

"That's never been there before," he said, looking across the room at an open door. There was a glowing neon "Exit" sign above it.

They looked at her, then back at the door. "Do you think..." she said, drifting off. Could God manipulate things down here? Or was this solely Lucifer's domain?

"Do I think it's a way out?" He paused, then nodded. "Yes, Detective, I believe it is."

Beyond the door was a path that sloped gently upward. It was lit by the same eerie blue light the rest of Hell, but there was a distinct lack of ash floating in the air. Chloe didn't know how far she could walk, she was so exhausted, but when the other option was staying in Hell, well. There wasn't really another option then. She turned to him and drew his head down she could kiss him. When they broke apart, he was looking at her with something like wonder in his red eyes.

"Let's go," she said, and headed for the door, Lucifer following behind her.

And so, they walked.

The further they got from Hell, the light grew less blue and started to fade so slowly she almost didn’t notice the darkness. After what felt like hours of walking—but in her exhausted state could have been mere minutes—Lucifer managed to shift back to his human glamour. He ran a hand over his face, and let out a sigh of relief, then took her hand, tangling his fingers with hers.

"I love you," he said suddenly as they walked in silence, and she squeezed his hand. "All I could think about, after-" he broke off and shook his head a little. A wave of guilt washed through her as she realized he meant after she had damned him by looking back. He took a breath. "All I could think was that I'd never told you how much I loved you."

She squeezed his hand tight. "I know. I know. I love you too."

He glanced over to her quick, his eyes almost immediately flitting away, before murmuring, "Yes, I believe you do."

The wavering uncertainty that belied his words broke her heart. "I wouldn't go to hell twice for just anyone," she said, nudging him with her good shoulder and trying to keep her tone light. The look on his face told her she'd failed.

"You will never know how much that means to me," he said, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She squeezed his hand again, her thumb sweeping over the pulse point on his wrist. "I think I have some idea," she said.

It started as a pinprick light ahead of them, when she was almost too tired to continue. As they walked, forcing one foot in front of the other, it grew larger until she realized it was the opening of the tunnel, light shining through into the darkness. She found herself gripping Lucifer's hand harder the closer they got. What was going to happen when she stepped through? Would she still have a body? Be a ghost? Would she just find herself right back in Hell?

"It will be okay," Lucifer said. "Whatever happens, it will be okay."

She made a noncommittal noise, and together, they stepped out into the bright white light of a new day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaand we're done. It feels... incredibly fucking weird to have posted the final chapter of this, after holding onto it for so long. It's like I don't know what to do with myself now. So weird.
> 
> Huge, epic thanks go to [@miyoung](https://twitter.com/miyoung) for the art at the end. It is perf and everything I had hoped for when I commissioned it.
> 
> I hope y'all enjoyed this ride, and I guess I'm gonna go... find something else to do with my life. Maybe write another fic. Yeah. That sounds good.


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